


Bigger on the Inside

by Linsky



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Still Hockey Players, Angst, Doctor Who fusion, First Time, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mention of Concussion, Minor Internalized Homophobia, Tentacle Porn, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-10 06:16:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 25,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15943469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linsky/pseuds/Linsky
Summary: Patrick goes on an accidental tour of the future. He is very confused about this thing where Jonny keeps kissing him.





	1. November 7, 2007

**Author's Note:**

> You do not need to know Doctor Who to read this! Mostly what you need to know is that the Tardis is a time machine. It's pretty much an excuse to get Patrick time traveling. :)
> 
> I'll be aiming to post a chapter per day of this, roughly one chapter per time jump. We'll see how I do!
> 
> A million thanks to Holly and Sheena for inspiring, cheerleading, and audiencing this with great enthusiasm. Holly has promised to write her own Time Lord AU, so you should all get excited about that. :D
> 
> Sometimes I do the [tumblr](https://linskywords.tumblr.com/) thing!

Patrick finds the TARDIS on a Wednesday.

He’s storming through the UC at the time, because if he goes back to the players’ lounge right now he’s going to punch Jonny in the face. Patrick doesn’t even do that to people—any time he’s attempted to fight it’s been laughable, as in, literally, people have laughed at him—but for Jonny, he’d make an exception. Stupid Jonny with his stupid stubborn face and his opinions about zone entries that are just soooo correct that he needs to spend twenty minutes shouting at Patrick about them, as if Patrick is some kind of moron who just picked up a stick for the first time last week and definitely couldn’t have any valid opinions of his own.

Honestly, after two months on the team together, it’s a miracle both of them are still alive.

It’s actually really disappointing. Patrick had a lot of reasons to be excited about being on the Hawks—original six team, drafted first overall, first season in the NHL—but he’s not gonna lie: a big part of it was getting to play with Jonathan Toews. He was just so obviously better than anyone Patrick’s played with so far, and being on a line with him at prospect camp was so good that Patrick would find himself staying awake at night in the weeks following, thinking about how maybe he was going to get years of that: the two of them, making awesome electric magical things happen on the ice. And playing together has been good so far. It’s just that Jonny doesn’t seem to agree—or at least, he doesn’t seem to have any respect for Patrick, not if respect means being willing to listen instead of clinging stubbornly to your own opinions like a self-righteous ass who deserves to be— 

Anyway. Patrick’s pretty sure punching Jonny in the face wouldn’t be a good idea for the team, or for Patrick’s hand, or for the game tonight, so instead he’s being the bigger person and storming off.

The problem is, he hasn’t actually explored the UC that much. He got an official tour in his first week, and he’s been in the parts with the locker rooms and the lounges and the offices and stuff, but there are also all these corridors and storage rooms and loading docks and random shit and actually he’s not sure where he is anymore. He’s…really not sure where he is.

Realizing he’s lost comes with a tiny trickle of adrenaline that feels cold alongside the fading rage from his fight with Jonny. He’s not actually worried—he’ll find a staircase up sooner or later, or he’ll run into someone who can point him back. But he feels so dumb, coming down here without any way to get back, like some stupid kid. Which he guesses he sort of is.

He tries to walk confidently, like he totally knows where he’s going, so that anyone he does meet will maybe just think he took a wrong turn and isn’t, you know, hopelessly lost. But fuck, it is _creepy_ down here. Patrick must have gone down more levels than he thought, because everything is drop-sheeted and there’s dust on the surfaces, like people don’t come down here a lot. He’s sure there are stairs in this direction—he thought it was this direction—but instead of finding them, he’s just wandering through an endless series of rooms, and why doesn’t he have any phone reception down here?

He’s trying to stay chill—the game isn’t for another couple of hours—when he sees the weird big blue box. It’s tucked into the corner of a storage room, behind some empty pallets, and it sticks out because it’s actually clean. More than that: it’s _blue,_ like actually bright blue, and it’s taller than Patrick, and it has little windows in the sides like it belongs on a street corner somewhere. It also says _Police Public Call Box_ along the top.

Patrick looks around him. He doesn’t want to actually call anyone; probably he’s going to find a staircase really soon, and he doesn’t want to make an idiot out of himself. He _definitely_ doesn’t want to call the police. But he’d kind of like to know if there’s a phone in there, just in case.

One of the sides of the box has handles and a little keyhole. Patrick figures it’s going to be locked—anything buried this far in the basement has to be locked—but actually the door swings open right away, and he sucks in a relieved breath until he actually gets a good look inside.

It’s _enormous._ Like, the room Patrick’s in isn’t that big—but as soon as he steps into the phone box, the walls and ceiling are all super far away. Maybe it’s, like…built into the walls of the room?

Patrick ducks back out of the box. Its top doesn’t even touch the ceiling. He does a quick walk around it, fingers trailing the walls, and it’s only like four feet wide in any direction. It doesn’t touch any of the walls of the storage room.

What the _fuck._

He goes back inside, and it’s just as big as it was before. Also, the decoration is crazy. It’s all green and bronze and glowy, like some kind of space ship, and there’s a center console that definitely seems like it was built by aliens. Or maybe by Hollywood set designers.

Maybe this is left over from some old event they had at the UC. Like, a children’s carnival, or some really edgy band or something. That would explain why it’s tucked into a storage room. Though Patrick still doesn’t understand how they got the walls and ceiling to expand like that.

He goes up to examine the center console. It has all these exposed wires, which are probably all fake. There’s obviously power in here—the console’s all glowy, and there’s a screen showing some weird intersecting circles—but that’s probably just for the effect.

Man. Patrick would have loved this so much when he was a kid. It’s even cool now; he kind of wants to bring some of the guys down here, maybe Sharpy or Burs or Jonny—

Not Jonny. He forgot about the part where Jonny’s a sanctimonious shithead. But the other guys. This is way too cool not to share.

He’s gonna have to remember how he found this place. He’s not too worried about getting back upstairs, not really, but he’ll have to remember his route, and then he’ll bring the other guys down as soon as they have a spare moment. Maybe he can even prank Sharpy with it somehow, or get him to bet that there can’t possibly be a room that’s bigger inside than outside. It’s always fun to make Sharpy lose a bet.

Patrick turns to leave, running his fingers over a piece of shining chrome—and everything changes.

At first he thinks it’s an earthquake or something. There are all these weird vworpy sounds, and the floor and the walls are shaking—he braces himself on a railing and hopes nothing falls on him. The lights are going crazy. He feels like he’s on the inside of an engine that’s getting ready to start internally combusting or whatever—and just as suddenly as it started, it stops.

Holy fuck. That was—Patrick’s not sure he even wants to use that to prank Sharpy. That was way too crazy to go through again. Which, like, that probably won’t stop him, but still. Whoa.

He looks around quickly, making sure everything is still standing. It is. He probably didn’t break the UC.

He heads out of the police box—prop box, whatever the fuck it is—and finds himself in a totally different room.

It’s…a bedroom. A nice one, with a huge bed and fancy-looking carpet and classy furniture and what the fuck is a bedroom doing in the basement of the UC?

Patrick goes back into the blue box. He comes back out again. Still the bedroom.

He goes back into the blue box and looks around for another exit door—presumably, the one he came in through. There isn’t one.

He goes back out into the bedroom. It has a door. Two of them: one leading to a bathroom, and one that goes to a hallway.

Patrick goes into the hallway. It leads to a living room, a big one with a comfortable-looking sectional and a huge TV and a wall of windows that look out over Chicago.

It’s definitely Chicago. Patrick stares down at the familiar streets. He’s got to be at least a dozen floors up. He was in the basement of the UC; how did he end up in some kind of skyscraper? Did he fall down and hit his head? Is he losing his mind?

He’s probably losing his mind. Fuck. He should never have stormed off in the first place. He’s going to _kill_ Jonny for this. Not that it’s Jonny’s fault, probably, but also it sort of is. Patrick can blame him if he wants to.

There’s a sound of a key in the lock.

Patrick hadn’t even noticed the front door yet. He spins toward it now—normal front door, normal apartment entrance, nothing trippy—and the door opens and Jonny comes in.

He smiles when he sees Patrick: a big smile that lights up his face, warmer than any Patrick’s ever seen from him. “Hey! I thought you weren’t going to be back this afternoon,” he says.

Now _that’s_ trippy. “What the fuck did you do,” Patrick says, backing up.

The smile falls off Jonny’s face. “What?”

“With the—” Patrick gestures around the apartment. The crazy weird magically appearing apartment he’s now apparently trapped in. “What did you do?”

“It—looks okay to me?” Jonny comes closer. “Are you okay?”

“Obviously not.” Patrick’s breathing really fast. It feels dumb to get so upset about this, but seriously, he doesn’t even know what’s happening right now.

“Is it—did I do something?” Jonny asks, eyes going puppy dog. And then he puts his hand on Patrick’s cheek.

Patrick stares at him. Jonny is looking at him really earnestly, and his _hand_ is on Patrick’s _cheek._

Okay, so Jonny’s probably not an evil mastermind who’s trapped Patrick in a creepy apartment of doom. Patrick’s probably just losing his mind. Maybe he’s supposed to be here, and he just…forgot. Lost a few hours of his life. Yeah.

“Um, no, you’re good,” Patrick says, which is about as close to sounding normal as he can get under the circumstances. “I’m just…feeling weird, I guess.”

“Oh, do you still have a headache?” Jonny asks, the concern on his face sliding into something more ordinary. “I’ll give you something to take,” he says, and then he comes closer and _presses his lips to Patrick’s temple._

Patrick jolts backward so fast he almost loses his balance. This is—this is not the kind of thing he’d hallucinate, if he—

Yeah, he is getting out of here.

He runs back into the hallway he came from and into the bedroom. He probably looks like an idiot, but he doesn’t care. Jonny just kissed his fucking temple and this is obviously not reality and he is getting back into that fucking blue box and making it reverse what it did to him before anything else freaky happens.

He shuts the bedroom door, and then he spins around. The blue box isn’t there.

The blue box isn’t there.

Patrick’s eyes bug out of his head before he realizes this is the wrong bedroom. This bed is messy, not neat, like someone was just sleeping in it, and the carpet is a different color. There’s a Blackhawks area rug over it. And the shades are open, showing the same view of Chicago he got from the living room.

Okay. He just went through the wrong door.

He should just go back out, but Jonny’s probably in the hallway. Wrong-Jonny. Alternate-dimension-fuck-with-Patrick’s-head Jonny. Patrick doesn’t want to see him again.

The game has got to be soon, though. He fishes his phone out of his pocket, and it’s only 5:45, thank fuck. He still has time to figure out how to get back. Hell, if he can’t get the blue box to work, he could always leave the building the normal way and get a cab to the UC. He even has reception again, so he could call—

He stares at his phone screen. It’s showing four bars, and the time, and also the date. Monday, March 15.

_March 15._

What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck—

His phone must be broken. That’s the only explanation. Patrick unlocks it and opens Safari and types in _todays date._

Google returns a result within milliseconds. Monday, March 15, 2010.

Patrick sits down on the bed with a thud.

There’s a knock on the door. “Pat?” Jonny says. “You okay in there?”

“Yeah,” Patrick says faintly. He’s not sure if it’s true or not.

“Mind if I…”

Patrick doesn’t say anything. He can’t quite say anything. After a minute the door opens slowly, and Jonny pokes his head in.

Apparently Patrick looks willing enough to have company, or at least crazy enough that he _needs_ company, because Jonny comes and sits next to him and puts a hand over Patrick’s. “Hey. Sorry if I was weird this morning,” Jonny says. “I really don’t mind when you go do things without me.”

Patrick manages to nod. Jonny’s hand is over his. Their fingers are interlacing a little.

“I guess I should have told you if I had plans for us for the day,” Jonny says—grudging, but that’s actually a relief. It sounds more like the Jonny Patrick knows.

Patrick studies his face. He does look older: his features look sharper, like there was some baby fat to be pared away. He looks good, Patrick thinks, before he can catch himself. That isn’t the kind of thought he has about Jonny. But it’s true: Jonny looks good.

“Hey,” Jonny says, “did you do something different with your hair?” He puts a hand up to run through Patrick’s curls, tugging a little and sending a shiver through Patrick’s gut.

“Yeah,” Patrick says, “I…” and then he tries to come up with an explanation, but it’s hard to think when Jonny’s fingers are drawing little circles on his scalp. He’s not used to Jonny touching him like this. And he doesn’t know how he wears his hair in 2010—shorter? Longer? More product? Less?

“It looks good,” Jonny says. “Like when I met you.” And then the hand in Patrick’s hair is angling his head, and Jonny’s mouth is on his.

Patrick gasps into the kiss. His stomach does this swoopy thing, and he doesn’t exactly mean to open his mouth, but he does, and there’s Jonny’s tongue brushing against his. Jonny gentles their lips together, sucking softly and Patrick’s whole body feels electrified and strange. He’s kissed girls before, but this is—he’s really—

He’s panting when Jonny breaks the kiss, and he’s sure he looks slightly crazed. Jonny’s looking at him with dark, intent eyes. He smooths a thumb over the corner of Patrick’s mouth. “I have to go do that call with Canadian Tire,” Jonny says, his voice rough. “But after, you wanna…”

“Yeah,” Patrick says, faint. Jonny’s eyes are fixed on his mouth. He leans in and kisses him again, just a brief press of lips, and then gets up, trailing his fingers through Patrick’s hair.

“Later,” he says, and leaves the room.

Patrick gives it like thirty seconds. Then he jumps up and goes to find that blue box.


	2. April 14, 2009

The blue box is still in the other bedroom, thank fuck. Patrick sags from relief when he sees it there, as ridiculously blue and out of place as ever. The door still opens—he’s not taking anything for granted now—and when he goes inside it’s still way bigger than the entire apartment and decorated in that creepy blue-green and bronze.

“Okay,” he says to it. “I don’t know what the fuck you did to me last time, but you are going to take me _back._ ”

He doesn’t really expect it to work when he touches the console again. But right away, the weird scifi sounds start, and the box—ship?—starts to shake around him.

Patrick’s not even scared by it this time. He’s just relieved. Whatever this future was, it was weird and not even possibly real. Like, there isn’t even the slightest possibility he ends up in, what, a _relationship_ with Jonny? The guy is a total ass, and Patrick’s never even thought of him that way. Well, maybe once or twice. But Patrick would never be in a relationship with someone who didn’t care about his opinions about hockey.

Besides, he’s not even gay.

The box stops shaking, and Patrick goes back out through the door. He’s still not in the basement of the UC, though--this time he’s outside in the woods.

“Motherfucker,” he spits.

He goes back inside. “Nice try,” he says to the console, and he runs his fingers over that piece of chrome again. 

Nothing happens.

“Are you kidding me?” he shouts. He pokes at a bunch more things, but nothing makes the box do the shaking thing again.

Maybe he’s doing it wrong. Maybe it has a refractory period. Maybe—maybe it was only good for two trips, and now he’s stuck here forever.

That last idea is too much to think about. He goes outside again.

It’s a gorgeous day, which feels a little cruel of the world, given how much Patrick doesn’t want to be here. It’s warm enough that he’s a little hot in long sleeves and jeans, and the sky is a brilliant blue. There are birds singing in the trees around him.

Okay, well, Patrick might as well figure out where he is. He pulls out his phone again—the Safari tab still says March 15, 2010—and when he refreshes it, it changes to Tuesday, April 14, 2009.

Closer. Hey, if he gets stuck here, he’s only lost…two years of his life.

If he’s even near Chicago. He opens the map app, and yeah, the little blue dot is on the shore of Lake Michigan, not too far from the city. He guesses he should leave his little stand of trees and figure out what’s going on here.

He only wanders for a minute or two along the lake shore before he hears familiar voices. It’s ridiculous how much of a relief it is. It doesn’t actually help him to have the team nearby—it’s still going to be the weird future/alternate-dimension team—but at least there’ll be someone familiar. He sees Duncs first, playing Frisbee with Seabs and Kelly-Rae, and there are Sharpy and Abby and Burs and Hammer and Laddy and…

They’re having a cookout or something, at this park on the lakeshore. Okay. Patrick can deal with that.

Burs sees him first. “Peekaboo!” he calls, and waves him over. Patrick goes to sit on a blanket with him and Sharpy and Abby. They all look about the same as he’s used to, and if he tries really hard he can maybe half-pretend this is normal. “Thought you couldn’t make it.”

“Plans changed,” Patrick says, while a slow-motion hot-cold wave of adrenaline rolls through him. What if he _had_ been able to make it today? He’s not sure if this is actual time travel or what, but there’s probably a current-time-period Patrick around somewhere. What would have happened if they’d both shown up?

“I’m just glad you stopped doing that terrible thing with your hair,” Sharpy says, reaching over to touch it before Abby slaps his hand away.

Abby smiles at Patrick, because she is a much better person than her boyfriend. “Are you excited about playoffs?” she asks him.

Patrick can only blink at her for a moment. Then it hits him, like the sun coming out from behind the clouds: Playoffs. They made the—

“For sure,” he says, and he knows his smile is ridiculous. So sue him. He’s in the NHL, and apparently in 2009 his team makes the playoffs.

“It’ll go better if our illustrious captain doesn’t set himself on fire first,” Burs says, nodding toward the grills.

Patrick looks over to see—Jonny.

It’s not really a surprise. It’s been obvious to Patrick from the start that Jonny’s captain material. It’s seemed less obvious lately, when he hasn’t wanted it to be true—he doesn’t want a captain who fights him at every turn. But Jonny’s the captain type. He’s the guy everyone’s eyes go to when he starts to talk, and there’s no denying he has the skill.

Right now, Jonny’s standing behind a grill and glaring as he fights with the controls. “Yeah, you’d better go to him, Peeks,” Sharpy drawls. “I think he needs your soothing touch.”

For a moment Patrick thinks Sharpy’s joking. And he is, obviously, but not quite in the way he should be—there’s an actual serious suggestion under there, and Patrick has this weird moment of suspended reality where he can’t quite make it make sense. Then he flips Sharpy off and gets up.

He mostly goes over because that’s what everyone seems to expect him to do. But also he’s kind of curious. Last time Jonny was—“weird” isn’t even a big enough word for it. Patrick can’t help but want to know what he’s like here.

Mostly what he’s doing at the moment is spitting swear words at the grill. “Trouble?” Patrick asks, leaning against the table that has all the buns and stuff.

Jonny’s eying the grill murderously. “This fucking piece of horseshit keeps burning the burgers.”

“Don’t you mean _you_ keep burning the burgers?” Patrick asks, and Jonny turns the murderous look on him.

It’s familiar. Patrick’s had that glare aimed at him a lot over recent weeks. He tenses automatically for the argument, but Jonny just goes back to poking the burgers. “I wouldn’t be burning them if this thing could just fucking heat them evenly.”

“It’s fire,” Patrick says, rolling his eyes. “What do you expect?”

“Yeah, but they’re not—”

“Why don’t you put them on the upper shelf instead and close the lid for a while?” Patrick says.

Jonny doesn’t say anything. Patrick’s not really surprised: if Jonny ever did take one of his suggestions, the world would probably end. But then—Patrick is seeing it with his own eyes and he can’t even believe it—Jonny takes the burgers and put them on the top shelf, and closes the lid.

Patrick feels like maybe the sky is going to turn purple, or something.

“Thanks,” Jonny says, kind of grudging, but that was an actual thank you, there.

“You’re welcome,” Patrick says cautiously.

The burgers turn out to be delicious. Jonny gives him one, and only scoffs a little when he puts cheese and a bun on it, and the two of them end up sitting on a blanket with some of the other guys and it feels almost normal. Except for the part where Jonny isn’t antagonizing him, obviously.

Maybe this is the friendship universe. Maybe the blue box thingy is, like, taking Patrick to a bunch of different versions of his relationship with Jonny to show him to appreciate what he has or some shit like that. Patrick’s okay with the friendship version, especially if that’s all it is. That 2010 world where Jonny was kissing him was just freaky.

But then later, they’re in the water—Patrick ends up borrowing Seabs’ swimsuit, because “did you feel that water, Peeks, I don’t care how nice a day it is, I’m not crazy like the two of you”—and he and Jonny have a freezing-cold splash war that Patrick wins, naturally, and it’s all fun and good until Jonny swims up behind him and holy _fuck_ that is his hand on Patrick’s ass.

“Hey,” Jonny says all low in his ear, ruining Patrick’s hopeful theories about how maybe Jonny is about to pants him or something. “You still coming over tonight?”

“Uh,” Patrick says. He is definitely not capable of operating his lips and tongue when Jonny’s hand is doing _that._ And _oh,_ wow, was that his— 

Jonny swims around to face him and hooks a leg around Patrick’s, running his heel up and down Patrick’s thigh. Patrick darts a look at the shore, but they’re in water up to their necks. No one can see anything.

“My parents are coming tomorrow,” Jonny says, his voice still low. “I figure we can make up for the time we’re about to lose.”

It’s like Patrick’s body has turned traitor on him. The slow stroke of Jonny’s heel is making heat pool in his stomach, and he’s sure his face is turning red. He’s just glad the water is cold enough and dark enough that he’s not totally embarrassing himself. “Uh-huh,” he says. “Yeah. Good idea.”

“I thought so,” Jonny says, smug, and for once Patrick doesn’t hate that look on him.

“Um, so,” Patrick says, casting around desperately for a change of topic. “Playoffs, huh?”

Jonny’s face lights up with this fierce joy. “We said we’d do it,” he says. “We said we’d bring hockey back to Chicago.”

They did say that. Patrick was starting to think Jonny didn’t mean it—with all the negative things he’s had to say about Patrick’s play, how could he? But here they are, a year and a half later, and it seems like they’re doing it. They’re on the way. “I thought—maybe you didn’t think that anymore,” Patrick says.

“What are you, crazy?” Jonny says, looking honestly baffled. “We’re second in the division. The two of us got a combined 139 points this year. We’re sure as fuck going to do it.”

Patrick can’t help but grin. He wonders how those points were divided—and then he wonders how many they got together, assisting on each other’s goals. “Fuck. We’re amazing,” he says.

“Yeah, we are,” Jonny says, voice rough, and when Patrick looks up, Jonny’s staring at his mouth.

Patrick’s gut lurches. He doesn’t want Jonny to kiss him again, obviously—that was weird and crazy, and also the whole team can see them from the shore. But also he’s remembering the way Jonny’s lips felt against his, the way Jonny’s tongue darted between his lips—

“Later,” Jonny says, and he moves away, leaving Patrick breathing a little hard and his thigh still tingling where Jonny’s heel was stroking against it.

Fuck. If he doesn’t figure out a way to leave this time, “later” might actually happen.

Patrick keeps thinking about it while they all hang out on the lake shore, and then he keeps trying not to think about it. It’s just—he shouldn’t want to think about it. But he can’t get it out of his head. He feels a little too aware of his whole body, and of where Jonny is in the crowd.

Which is usually pretty near Patrick, actually. Patrick has to make up some dumb excuse to go back and find the blue box again, and even when he does he basically has to run away to keep Jonny from following him.

The box is still there, right where he left it in the trees. He goes to touch the controls—and hesitates.

It's not that he wants to—to do stuff with Jonny tonight. It would be weird, and uncomfortable, and Patrick _isn’t even gay_. It's just, there’s been a lot to think about. It’s all there right now, heating up his gut.

He breathes in, and touches the chrome handle, and the world starts shaking again.


	3. November 10, 2008

Patrick’s reluctant to open the door this time. He knows what he’s hoping for—a storage room in the basement of the UC—but he doesn’t think there’s much of a chance of him getting it. And sure enough, when he opens the door, he’s outdoors again, in the corner of some parking lot he’s never seen before.

At least he’s in the city this time—and hey, look at that, it’s Chicago. His phone tells him he’s actually not that far from the UC, tucked behind some random shopping center. And it’s November 10, 2008.

Progress. Probably only a couple more trips before Patrick’s back in his own time. The box doesn’t react when he touches the controls, of course—the refractory period theory is looking more and more likely—but there’s a Starbucks around the corner. He can chill for a while.

He’s heading around the corner to get a frappucino or something—fuck the nutrition plan right now, seriously—when his phone chimes. It’s a text from Jonny: _want to go over game tape?_

Patrick has a moment of thinking a text from his own time somehow got through whatever weird time distortion thing is happening around him. But no, that doesn’t make sense. His phone is still his phone; it would still connect to the cell networks in 2008. This is probably a text from Jonny in 2008.

Hang on. Holy fuck. If Patrick can get texts from 2008, he could access _any_ information from 2008.

He doesn’t know why this hasn’t occurred to him before. But that first trip to 2010 felt like visiting some bizarre film set, and even the trip to the lake shore felt so self-contained. Now he’s in the middle of the city, and his phone is receiving texts, and he could look up anything.

Last year’s season. He could see everything: how many wins they got, how many points, whether they got to the playoffs. He could—oh shit. He could look at each individual game. He could see who was going to score when, and how; he could even watch tape of it. He could figure out exactly what to do to change those games and win them.

Fuck. He has to sit down.

Patrick sits on a random street bench while he lets the idea turn over in his mind. It has some flaws: he still isn’t a hundred percent sure he isn’t in some alternate dimension or elaborate delusion or something. And hockey is a game with a super high degree of randomness. Maybe knowing which goal was going to be scored first make him play differently, so that the goals would end up being different, too. And then there’s the paradox thing, which makes his head hurt when he starts to think about it: if knowing about those goals was what made him play the way he did, he might make the goals happen by trying to prevent them, and…

But if not. If it works. They could get an edge in every single game, and all because of Patrick.

It’s incredibly tempting, and in the end it’s super easy to decide against it. He’s a little surprised by his own decision: it seems so obviously advantageous to at least _try_ to figure out how the games will go. But when he thinks for even ten seconds about how it would go he doesn’t like it. He loves playing hockey: loves pitting his team’s skills and strength and intelligence and will against the other team’s, fighting hard and leaving everything on the ice. He doesn’t like the idea of going into each game armed with foreknowledge of how each move is supposed to happen. He’s not sure he’d play the way he’d need to if he knows they’re going to win, and it might be worse if he knows they’re going to lose. And either way, it would be impossible not to get into his head about it. It would be a huge mistake to look.

Even if it is really fucking tempting.

He’s staring at his phone, trying to ignore the voice that still thinks he should at least find out what the team’s record was, when the screen lights up again. Jonny’s text hasn’t actually been opened.

Does Patrick want to watch game tape? He doesn’t know what kind of Jonny he’ll find: whether it’s a Jonny he’s friends with, or still fighting with, or…more. The second one doesn’t seem very likely, if Jonny’s inviting him over. The third one…Patrick doesn’t even know. He doesn’t even know how to think about it.

In any case, he has some time to kill before the blue box thingy is ready to travel again. And going to hang out with Jonny will be a good distraction from the things he really shouldn’t be looking up.

_sure,_ he sends back. Then he goes to his phone app, because even if he’s not looking up game results, there’s something else he can still check on.

His mom answers after just a couple of rings. “Just wanted to say hi,” he says when she answers. “How is everyone?”

***

Getting to Jonny’s building is the easy part. His current address is in Patrick’s contacts—Patrick’s really glad he didn’t just head to Seabs’ place—and Jonny’s doorman lets him right up. The hard part is not being sure how he should act once he’s there.

Jonny’s friendly to him. A Jonny brand of friendly, which means they start arguing about whether Patrick’s sneaker collection is dumb as soon as Patrick’s through the door, but Patrick’s never minded that kind of argument. It reminds him of bickering with his sisters. And evidently the two of them do this a lot, if the ease with which Jonny starts in on him is any indicator.

Jonny doesn’t try anything else, though. They sit down on the couch, and Patrick’s on his guard against it, but Jonny doesn’t try to, Patrick doesn’t know, hold his hand or snuggle him or anything. Any of the weird alternate-reality shit that’s been going on. They just argue about what kind of takeout to order, and Jonny makes a big stink about how Thai isn’t healthy, and by the time their sushi gets there Patrick’s forgotten to be tense about stuff.

Then Jonny reaches over and takes one of Patrick’s California rolls, natural as anything, and Patrick freezes a little. They’re not sitting that close together, so Jonny has to get right up into Patrick’s space to do it. And it doesn’t feel like a teasing thing—Jonny isn’t trying to get a rise out of him. It’s like he doesn’t even notice it.

Patrick looks over at Jonny’s sushi. The rainbow roll does look pretty amazing—Patrick’s been regretting not getting one—but it might be safer not to rock the boat. Unless it seems weird if Patrick _doesn’t_ take some of Jonny’s food?

Then Jonny leans over and gets one of his sweet potato rolls—the ones he told Patrick weren’t healthy enough to get—and, okay. Patrick’s taking a piece of rainbow roll.

Jonny doesn’t even look up when Patrick does it. Patrick keeps half an eye on him as he dunks the roll in his own soy sauce, and then he swallows it along with the little burst of adrenaline. It’s like it didn’t even happen.

How often do they eat together, if this is how they are about it?

Patrick’s—not on edge, exactly, as they settle in to watch game tape, but he’s being careful. He’s not sure what the dynamic is here. Jonny props his feet up on the coffee table and starts talking about the Bruins’ defense. Patrick waits a little before chiming in, and when he does, Jonny shoots him this look—like _finally,_ like he was wondering why Patrick wasn’t saying anything before.

Patrick tells Jonny he’s wrong about Tukka Raask.

“Fuck you, I am not wrong,” Jonny says, wild-eyed, and he backs up to the right part of the tape, and Patrick says, “No, look, it’s not that he’s not guarding his glove side, it’s just that—”

And by the time they’ve made it through the first period, Patrick is breathing fast, and—and he’s half-hard in his jeans.

There’s an awkward moment where both of them are quiet, not starting the next period yet, and Jonny says, “I’m gonna—do you want any water?”

“Yeah,” Patrick says, and Jonny leaves, and Patrick tucks his knees up and leans against the back of the couch to try to chill a little.

Jonny has such a particular style of argument. Patrick’s gotten really used to it over the past couple of months, but he’s never thought of it as something fun before. He’s not sure why he’s suddenly reacting quite the way he is. It has to be the memories that keep cycling through his head: 2009 Jonny, hooking his leg behind Patrick’s and whispering in his ear like that. 2010 Jonny, leaning in and pressing his lips to Patrick’s—

Jonny comes back, a glass of water in each hand. He’s a little flushed: just a touch of color along his cheekbones. “Next period?” he says.

“Definitely,” Patrick says, and notices exactly how close Jonny is when he sits back down on the couch. It’s only about a foot away—not super close, but way closer than before. And it’s a big couch.

He gets a little zing in his nerves every time Jonny moves for the rest of the game. Jonny closes the gap a few times—just for innocent reasons, like hitting Patrick on the arm to call his attention to something on the TV. He doesn’t try anything else.

By the time the game’s over, Patrick is wondering if he should just kiss Jonny already. But that would be crazy and also he doesn’t actually want to, obviously. He just wants to end the suspense of wondering if Jonny’s going to kiss _him_. Which is a terrible reason to kiss anyone, and so he’s not going to do it. He just kind of wishes he knew if something was going to happen or not.

Jonny walks him to the door after they’re done watching the game. “We’re gonna own the Bruins on Wednesday,” Jonny says, and Patrick agrees, even though he’s not going to play in the game. Or, he will, but not for another year or so. He has a lot of other games to play first, if he can actually get back for them.

Jonny hovers kind of close while Patrick puts on his shoes. Patrick’s skin prickles with the proximity. He has his hand on the doorknob, ready to escape the craziness of this whole experience, when Jonny says, “I don’t know if you—I mean, last time—”

Patrick looks up at him. Jonny’s standing really close, looking down at Patrick really intently. He brings up a hand and touches it to Patrick’s jaw.

Patrick’s mouth parts automatically as his stomach does a slow flip. Jonny’s thumb is sliding slowing along the line of his jaw and sparking nerves all over his body. He should say something—something to show that he doesn’t want this, that Jonny’s got this all wrong, except—

Jonny leans in and joins their mouths together. It’s a more cautious kiss than the one Patrick got in 2010, a little hesitant, but Jonny’s mouth is still slick and hot and Patrick can’t help but make a sound in his throat.

That’s apparently the encouragement Jonny needs, because he slides his hands down to Patrick’s hips and Patrick finds himself pushed back against the door, melting under the feeling of Jonny’s body pressing against him. Jonny kisses very thoroughly: Patrick feels like it keeps giving him things he’s not expecting, like he’s getting used to how good it is and then Jonny’s tongue will do something unexpected and he suddenly wants more than he thought was impossible. His heart is racing, blood rushing quick and hot throughout his body as Jonny shifts and moves against him in just the right way to—

Jonny pulls back, both of them breathing hard. Jonny’s, like…glowing, smiling this tiny smile that’s practically incandescent. “That,” Jonny says. “That was what I wanted to do.”

“Asdklajdkglj,” Patrick says, or something to that effect.

Jonny’s eyes drop to his mouth. “You’d better go,” he says. “I mean, unless you want to—”

“Um,” Patrick says. He’s not sure his knees will hold him up right now, which is maybe an argument for staying, except—“Maybe, uh. Next time?”

Jonny’s smile comes back, brilliant and almost more than Patrick can take. “Okay,” he says, pressing another quick kiss on Patrick’s mouth, and then Patrick’s in the hallway and walking on wobbly legs toward the elevator.

He had to go along with the kissing, Patrick tells himself as he exits the building. It was the only thing to do if he didn’t want to explain the whole time travel mess. And he _can’t_ explain it, so, you know. He had to go along with it.

As for how he reacted to it…well, he’s just not going to think about that too much.

He’s on the street outside when his phone chimes. He pulls it out, wondering if maybe Jonny has something else he wanted tell him, but it’s not from him. The number says, _Maybe: Patrick Kane,_ and the message just says, _get a good nights sleep tonight._

Patrick unlocks the phone and looks at the text app. The number is his own, and the message shows up twice, like he both sent it and received it.

Holy fuck. His heart is beating really fast. He hadn’t even really thought—like, of course there’s a Patrick Kane alive in this time period, Patrick knew that, he just hadn’t _thought_ about it.

_what the fuck,_ he sends to himself. _what is going on?_

There’s a little pause, and then a typing bubble shows up, himself typing back to him. _sorry,_ the text reads. _doesnt work like that._

Patrick stares at the phone in outrage as he walks down Jonny’s street, madder at himself than he can ever remember being. _fuck you,_ he types a second later, and yes, he is aware of the irony, thank you very much. _if im gonna make out with jonny for you, you can at least tell me how to get back home._

_like you didnt enjoy it,_ the response reads, and, okay, Patrick’s self is a _dick._ Then, a minute later, another text: _remember what i said about the sleep._


	4. March 1, 2009

The blue box is where Patrick left it, mostly hidden in a dumpster enclosure. Patrick wonders if he should go inside—if he’s supposed to get a good night’s sleep, maybe he’s supposed to do that before he makes his next trip? But he doesn’t know where he’d sleep out here. He could maybe get a hotel; his credit card doesn’t expire until 2010. But he feels nervous leaving the box unattended for so long. What if the dumpster people take it in the morning? He guesses his future self would have warned him if that was going to happen, but maybe it happened differently for him, or—Patrick doesn’t know how this works. His head hurts.

He goes into the blue box, and he’s going to touch the handle that usually makes him jump in time, but then he notices another door on the far side of the console. That wasn’t there before. Patrick’s almost sure of it; he remembers looking for another exit. But the walls on the inside of the box are kind of busy, with these metal lumps like huge rivets and big bronze-colored beams running up the sides to meet in the center of the ceiling, and _maybe_ the door was there before. In any case, it’s definitely there now.

Patrick turns the latch on the main doors, the ones he normally exits through, and walks across to the new one.

It seems like too much to hope that the box has finally taken pity on him and is giving him an exit to the UC in the fall of 2007. But he’s still unreasonably disappointed when the door leads to another room in the same decorating scheme as the big console room.

This one’s a bedroom. “Oh, fuck you,” Patrick says to his phone. A good night’s sleep, huh?

He kind of doesn’t want to get one just out of spite, but he’s pretty tired by now, and also, his future self doesn’t seem to want to talk to him much. If he broke his silence just to tell Patrick to sleep…

Patrick wrinkles his nose but goes to lie down in the bed. There’s a dresser on the way, and he pulls out a pair of pajamas—too long for him, but he can make do. He’s been in these clothes for kind of a while.

The pajamas are made out of this ridiculously soft fabric, and the bed turns out to be the same: Patrick sits down on it and instinctively closes his eyes because it just feels so good. The air in the room is cool, and the covers are nice and warm, and the mattress is the perfect blend of soft and supportive. It’s everything Jonny’s always complaining he doesn’t get from the mattresses in their hotel rooms.

There’s a nightstand next to the bed with a lamp and a couple of drawers. Patrick opens the drawers out of curiosity before he turns out the light. The top one has an iPhone charger in it, which he grabs—the plug is weird-shaped, but it matches the outlet behind the nightstand, and the last thing he wants is to have his phone die on him. And in the bottom drawer—

Patrick glares up at the room at large. “I do _not_ want to have sex with Jonny!” he says.

The room is silent. So is the drawer of sex toys he just opened. Almost as if they’re just physical objects and not a message and, okay, Patrick really needs to get home, because he is definitely starting to lose it.

He’s obviously not going to do anything with the drawer full of sex toys he found randomly in a strange time machine/space ship. But there’s one near the top that looks like it would have a really interesting texture, like one of those stress balls only translucent, so he has to touch it just out of curiosity. And a lot of the other ones are in bright colors and interesting shapes, like a big bulbous thing that Patrick drops as soon as he realizes where it’s supposed to go, and this magenta tassely thing that he doesn’t know _what_ it does, and a long thin purple wand with a button that—

“Oh,” Patrick says, dropping it when it starts buzzing in his hand. That’s—oh. That’s what that’s for.

He feels his face getting hot. There’s no one here, but he still kind of feels like someone’s going to see him.

He should just put this stuff back and go to bed. That’s what his other self told him to do. But the heat in his stomach is back, the heat that came from Jonny’s mouth on his, and—jerking off is a valid way to get to sleep. He’d still be following instructions.

The little purple wand is still buzzing against the other toys in the drawer. Patrick’s never actually tried a vibrator before; why would he have bothered, when he has his hand? But when it’s right here…. He picks it up and holds it against his lips, just to get a better idea of how intense it is, and then he rucks up his shirt and presses it against his nipple.

He gasps. The feeling arrows straight to his cock and makes it press against his fly. He needs to get his clothes off, right now.

A minute later he’s lying naked on the ridiculously soft sheets, nipples tight little buds that twinge as he rubs the vibrator over them. His cock is standing up too, the head a bright red as it curves toward his stomach, and when Patrick touches the vibrator to it he can’t help making a noise. It’s so easy to slip into remembering: the weight of Jonny’s body pressed against him, the slide of his tongue against Patrick’s, the way his lips looked all red and kiss-bitten when he pulled back…

Patrick shivers, the vibration almost too much on the sensitive spot right under his cockhead. He could probably come from just this. But he can’t help imagining more: what would have happened if he’d said yes to Jonny and gone into his bedroom. Maybe they would have jerked each other off, Jonny’s hand tight on Patrick’s cock as his dark eyes watched Patrick’s reactions, or maybe—maybe Jonny’s mouth, wrapping around his cockhead, sucking the pleasure out of him. Or maybe—

Patrick’s never thought about being with a guy before, or at least not in detail. He’s definitely never imagined what a guy might want to do if Patrick had sex with him, because he’s not gay. But he can still feel the way his stomach lurched when Jonny pinned him to the door, and he takes the little vibrating wand and slides it down to his balls, and then to his taint, and then to the little ring of muscle around his hole.

It feels weird, having the vibration there—it sends a spasm up through his whole body, making him want to twitch away from it. His first thought is relief: he doesn’t like this, it was just a random impulse that made him try it, he’s not really into gay stuff. But he keeps the vibrator against his hole anyway. It’s kind of like trying a strong-tasting food: it’s not a nice feeling, exactly, but he’s intrigued by it, wants more of it. Wants to keep pushing into it as it builds.

And it does build. Patrick circles his rim with the wand. He gets his other hand in a loose grip on his cock, and that turns the feeling into something closer to sex. The buzzing travels up into his guts, turning everything up a notch and making his cock leak onto his stomach a little. He presses harder with the wand, and something gives way—

“Oh,” he gasps as the tip of the wand slips inside. That’s a weird feeling of a different kind. It’s actually less intense than the buzzing on his rim, maybe, but his rim is still in play, and when he squeezes down around the wand he can feel the vibration everywhere, inside and out. He pushes the wand in further, squeamish about the intrusion, but then _oh holy fuck_ —

Patrick’s hips piston up and down as the wand strikes what has to be, like, the control center of his whole nervous system, oh _god._ White sparkles are skittering across his vision. His other hand tightens on his cock, clumsy but it doesn’t matter, not when his entire body is being electrified with pleasure, and he fucks himself on the wand again and again and a—

His back arches like a bow and he comes all over his stomach.

When he collapses back to the bed, his nerves are singing, and the purple wand is still vibrating in his ass. He slips it out and turns it off, because it’s too much now that he’s so sensitive. Fuck, he’s not sure he’ll ever come down from that one. He feels like his whole body was turned inside out.

He opens his eyes and looks at the room, the room that wasn’t there before and probably isn’t, like, sentient or anything, but Patrick doesn’t trust it. “This still doesn’t mean I want to have sex with Jonny, okay?” he says.

The room doesn’t say anything. Obviously. Patrick drops the toy over the edge of the bed. He’s going to have to clean that in the morning.

***

There isn’t any such thing as a morning, exactly—not inside here. But Patrick wakes up feeling like he’s slept enough.

He steps on the purple wand as he gets out of bed, and his stomach clenches. What was he thinking? He’s not a—he doesn’t do that kind of thing. He’s never even wanted to, not before Jonny started grabbing him and kissing him and messing with his head and making him think it’s a normal thing to fuck himself on a vibrator.

But fuck, was it ever hot.

Patrick doesn’t pay attention to the bulge at the front of his pajama pants. He goes to wash the thing off.

He’s good and ready to get out of here. He’s thinking the next trip might bring him home—or maybe not quite, if his other self was trying to warn him about something, but another two trips will probably do it. He puts his normal clothes on and touches the controls.

And steps out a minute later into the U.C.

Patrick’s thrilled for the approximately three seconds it takes him to realize that he’s not in the basement storage room he started in. He’s in an equipment room, all right, but one he knows: the one near the locker room where the spare pads and stuff are held. But maybe the blue box just didn’t bring him back to quite the same place.

He pulls out his phone: March 1, 2009. _Fuck._

He’s almost four months ahead of where he was last time, which means he’s not just traveling back to where he started. Which means he might be more screwed here when he thought.

Okay. He’s not going to panic. He’s not going to stay in this room, either; he probably has a while before the box will do its thing again, and if he stays in here he’s going to go crazy. He steps into the hallway—just in time to see Jonny poke his head around the corner.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Jonny asks. “Q is looking for you.”

Q? Who the hell is Q? “Like in Bond?” Patrick asks, but Jonny doesn’t hear him; he’s already turned back and is headed toward the locker room.

Patrick follows him. When he steps inside, the whole team’s there, fully suited up, lacing their skates and taping their sticks. Patrick checks his phone again; it’s seven o’clock. Oh, fuck. They must have a _game._

“Kaner!” Someone’s calling him—a big guy with a mustache who Patrick’s never seen before. The guy gives him a once-over. “What happened to your gear?”

“Just about to put it on,” Patrick says. “I had a leg thing.”

It’s lame, but all he can come up with at the moment. The big guy seems satisfied. “As long as you’re good to go for the game. Just wanted to tell you you’ll be back on Tazer’s line for the night.”

“Sure,” Patrick says, way more alarmed than he was a minute ago. Has he not been on Jonny’s line? It’s been a year and a half; maybe the lines have gotten shaken up. He kind of hates that idea, though—playing together is, like, the only thing he and Jonny are good at. And who is this guy? Savvy’s the one who sets the lines.

“Well, go change,” the guy says, frowning, and Patrick goes over to his stall in a confused daze.

His gear bag is there. Even, like, his wallet and his keys, which means someone left this all here very recently. The Patrick who belongs in this time, he assumes. But what the fuck happened to him? Why isn’t _he_ playing this game?

A lot could have changed on the team in a year and a half. Patrick’s not gonna know about it. It’s hard to keep his hands steady while he laces his skates.

He makes himself do some deep breathing exercises when he’s done. This is just another game. Patrick knows how to play hockey; that’ll carry him through even if he messes up a few of the plays. No point in getting in his head about it.

And hey, at least he got a good night’s sleep.

That fucker. Patrick’s kind of mad at—himself—but he also doesn’t really want to screw himself over either, so he pulls his phone out and sends a quick text after he’s changed. _where are u?? i can switch out if you let me know where to meet u._ Then he stares at the phone, waiting for a reply bubble to show up.

“Hey, Kaner.” Jonny’s standing over him now. “Let’s not do the new passing plays tonight—the Kings are too good at interceptions. You should just bring the puck into the zone yourself, if you can.”

Patrick blinks at him. It’s Jonny, all right, and he has his determined game face on, but it’s somehow very different from the one Patrick’s used to seeing. He’s actually looking at Patrick. Like Patrick could respond and Jonny would actually listen. It’s even weirder than the C on Jonny’s sweater.

“Uh, yeah, okay,” Patrick says. He doesn’t know what the new passing plays are, anyway. “I mean, I _can_ , obviously.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jonny says, rolling his eyes—the kind of thing that would have made Patrick snap at him before. But he was basically just complimenting Patrick’s ability to control the puck, and…maybe the eye roll doesn’t mean as much as Patrick thinks it does. Maybe a lot of things Jonny does don’t mean what Patrick thought they did. “Just don’t screw up.”

“Right back at you,” Patrick says.

“Okay, everyone!” the mustached guy says (where the hell _is_ Savvy?), and the game is on.

***

The game is weird. Patrick feels unstable the whole time. It turns out the mustached guy is Q, their new head coach, and he and Jonny are on a line with a guy named Troy Brouwer who was in Rockford last year. And Savvy is gone.

Savvy is gone. Patrick can’t even believe that. He certainly can’t understand it: he _knows_ how well Savvy understands the game. Savvy was going to get them where they needed to go. But apparently the franchise just gave up on him?

It’s a good thing Q put Patrick back on Jonny’s line. Patrick doesn’t know how he would have played if he didn’t have any familiar touchstones. Jonny on the ice is the same as always, far-seeing and driven and strong, where Patrick expects him to be at least most of the time, and Patrick figures out that by paying attention to Jonny he can guess most of the plays. Not that he mimics Jonny or anything—that wouldn’t even make sense for most of the plays—but by seeing where Jonny’s going, Patrick can intuit where he himself should be. It’s how they’ve always worked.

He’s still a fraction slower than usual, though, and in hockey a fraction of a second can cost you everything. He doesn’t have any shots on goal until the third period—which almost never happens—and the first one he gets is on a power play, when they’ve been cycling for a whole thirty seconds and Patrick’s starting to think they’ll never get a clear shot through the screen of defenders. Then something opens up, one player going one way and the other countering in a way that will create an opening a split second from now, and Patrick shoots—

The feeling of the puck going into the goal is as good as it always is, a high that’s even higher now that he’s in the NHL and playing the toughest game there is. His teammates jump on him, Jonny, Duncs, Seabs, Sharpy wrapping him up, and for the first time in a while Patrick feels like he’s right where he belongs.

“Good work,” Q says after the game, with a thoughtful look that means he noticed the slowness earlier. Patrick ducks his head and thanks his lucky stars he got a goal to make up for it.

He wants to leave as soon as he’s showered and changed. He feels the strain of every moment he’s here: on the edge of doing something wrong, giving himself away. He doesn’t know what the fuck happened to the Patrick who’s supposed to be here or why he abandoned him to this instead of, oh, telling him not to come out of the equipment room, but he’s done with it.

He leaves the locker room, planning to slip into the equipment room and find the blue box as soon as no one’s looking, and instead he finds his whole family in the hallway.

It’s horrible timing but all Patrick can feel is a huge rush of relief. He just—it feels like it’s been weeks and weeks since he was in his own time, even if it’s only actually been a couple of days, and he wants to cry and hug all of them at once. “Patty!” the girls squeal, running towards him, and he lets them wrap him up.

“How are you all? Are you good?” he asks. It’s only been four months of real-world time since he checked with his mom about them, and they seem fine, but a lot can happen in four months.

It turns out Jackie’s trying out modern dance and Jess is prom-dress shopping and Erica’s finally passing her econ class. Patrick realizes halfway through a sentence that Erica is older than he is, in college, and he loses his train of thought to stare at her.

“So?” Erica says, grinning and dropping her voice. “How’s _Jonny_?”

“Erica!” he hisses, scanning to see if anyone else is near enough to have overheard.

“Don’t tease your brother,” Patrick’s mom says. She and Patrick’s dad have been hanging behind the girls, waiting till the sibling reunion is over, and Patrick wants to hug them, too, though he can tell from his dad’s face that he has things to say about tonight’s game.

The Jonny thing, though—Patrick has no idea what they know. If it’s March of 2009, they’ve been—hooking up, whatever you want to call it—for four months. Does his family know? Erica obviously knows something, but—

“We’re just curious,” Jackie says, innocent-faced.

“Yeah, what even is there to tease him about?” Jess asks, smirking.

“Jonny’s—fine,” Patrick says, sure his face is turning various shades of red as he speaks. “I mean, I’m sure he’s—”

“Jonathan,” his mother says warmly, and Patrick looks around to see Jonny coming toward them.

He’s all clean and showered but still red-cheeked from the game, and Patrick has never thought before what a good look that is on him. Not that he’s thinking it now.

Jonny smiles and shakes his parents’ hands because he is a colossal suck-up. “Donna. Tiki. Glad you could make the game.”

“Are you free tonight? You should come eat with us,” Patrick’s mom says, and how is this even happening right now?

Patrick makes it through five more minutes of small talk, his sisters all grinning and nudging him, before he decides he is not gonna be able to take a whole evening of this. “You guys go ahead,” he says. “I have something I have to check on real quick.” Then he’s speed-walking away down the halls of the UC, pulling out his phone as he goes.

_this is YOUR PROBLEM,_ he sends to himself as he scans the doors for the right equipment room. Yeah, okay, this one—and there’s the blue police box, mostly hidden behind a rack of pads.

His phone buzzes a second later, and he sees that his text to himself has arrived. _this is YOUR PROBLEM,_ his phone screen tells him.

It feels sadly appropriate.


	5. July 15, 2010

Patrick doesn’t find out if the other him ever made it to dinner. He touches the controls in the blue box, and the world shakes, and when he opens the door it’s a sixteen months later.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” he says to the date on his phone. He was hoping the jump forward last time was just a fluke, but now he’s actually the farthest out he’s ever been. July 15, 2010.

Well, at least the world hasn’t exploded or anything. That’s nice to know.

He’s in a park or something again—no, a lawn, he thinks. There’s a house not far off. It’s a pretty sweet house, actually: huge, with all these windows and these columns and he’s pretty sure that’s a gate on the driveway. He goes a few steps out past the trees he’s landed in, and there’s a lake in the distance. Overall, pretty awesome.

Well, not so much, if he’s not supposed to be here and they call the cops or whatever. But so far he’s been landing near places and people he knows. This box might be frustrating and kind of horrible, but at least it seems limited in its range. So he suspects he at least knows whoever owns this place.

He walks around the side of it, cautious in case he’s wrong and they’re about to sic guard dogs on him, and stops when he sees that someone’s in the pool.

Not just someone: _Jonny’s_ in the pool.

Patrick doesn’t even know why he’s surprised. Every time he comes out of the box he seems to see Jonny, or hear from Jonny, or be in Jonny’s apartment or whatever. He should be used to it by now. But his stomach jumps a little anyway.

Jonny’s swimming laps, tan arms cutting through the water. Patrick watches him for a few minutes—not like a creeper; he didn’t even want to be here, okay?—until Jonny surfaces at one end of the pool and catches sight of him.

“Hey.” Jonny’s face lights up in a smile. “I didn’t know what time you were getting here.”

“Yeah,” Patrick says nonsensically. There’s water streaming down Jonny’s shoulders and chest and arms as he levers himself out of the pool, and it’s kind of…a lot. Not that Patrick cares. “I mean, yeah. I’m…here now.”

“I noticed,” Jonny says dryly, like he thinks he’s being hilarious, and then he’s coming closer and oh—

Patrick should be used to getting kissed by Jonny by now. But it still shorts out his brain. All he can do is tip his head back and let Jonny’s mouth open him up, cool water from the pool and warm lips and tongue and Patrick’s never been kissed like this. Not the first time Jonny kissed him, or the second. Not in a way that means _welcome home_ and happiness and familiarity and heat.

Jonny pulls back while Patrick’s trying to stay upright. “I missed you,” he says, low, his thumbs digging into Patrick’s biceps.

“Mm,” Patrick says. It’s about the most articular thing he’s capable of right now.

Jonny laughs. “Why don’t you get a suit on and join me?”

“Uh-huh,” Patrick says. That sounds manageable. He can do that. He’ll just go and put on a suit. “Uh, where are the swimsuits?”

Jonny shrugs. “How should I know? It’s your house.”

Right. Of course it is.

***

Patrick looks at the house differently as he goes in. This is going to be _his._ How fucking baller is that?

He goes through the big kitchen (nice) and two different sunrooms (sweet) and the huge gaming room (fucking _yes_ ) before he makes it upstairs. He’s a little worried about figuring out which room is his, but it turns out he shouldn’t have been. He should have trusted his own decor.

He stands in the window of the black-and-red master bedroom, staring out at Lake Erie. “My life is the best,” he declares solemnly.

He maybe dawdles a little while he changes. He’s not sure what’s going to happen when he gets back down there—back down to Jonny in his soaking-wet swimsuit, the one that clings to his thighs—and he doesn’t feel quite up to facing it right away. But there’s only so long someone can plausibly take to put on a swimsuit.

Jonny’s still in the water when he gets back down. “Race you?” Jonny says, and obviously Patrick is all over that.

Jonny wins by a lot, which is embarrassing. “Thought you were working on your swimming,” Jonny says, smug.

“Yeah, yeah, caught me on an off-day,” Patrick says, shoving back a little when Jonny pushes him. Jonny’s so close, all that skin, and Patrick wonders if he’s gonna—

But Jonny pulls back and gets out of the pool. “I’m starving. Want to eat?”

“Sure,” Patrick says, not staring at Jonny’s ass as he walks away.

Patrick’s so aware of Jonny’s body near his as they put together sandwiches. Jonny keeps finishing Patrick’s motions like he doesn’t even have to think about it. “Not that, it’s not gluten-free,” Jonny says as Patrick gets some bread out, and Patrick’s momentarily baffled—is he gluten-free? Is Jonny?—but Jonny puts another loaf in his hands and they go back to assembling, moving around each other as easily as they do on the ice.

At one point Jonny passes behind him and presses a kiss to the back of his neck and Patrick stops mid-motion, mouth falling open. He can feel it all the way down to his knees. He thinks maybe Jonny’s going to slide his arms around him, put his mouth there again—but Jonny’s getting the pickles out of the fridge. Patrick goes back to the cold cuts.

He doesn’t _want_ anything to happen, he reminds himself as they sit down on the couch with their sandwiches. But it feels weird that it hasn’t, with the way Jonny kissed him hello, and the fact that it’s evidently been a few days since they’ve seen each other. What is Jonny waiting for? Patrick keeps twitching every time Jonny moves on the couch, wondering if this will be the moment he reaches out and touches him. And Jonny does reach out, after they finish their sandwiches—but just to put his arm around Patrick’s shoulders. He starts playing with the hair at the back of Patrick’s neck while he channel surfs.

“I like when you have curls here,” Jonny says, tugging on the little pieces.

There are shivers running down Patrick’s arms and ribcage. “Too lazy to keep it cut in the summer,” he murmurs. It’s sort of true, a lot of the time. But he’ll gladly keep it long all the time if it makes Jonny do that—

Not that Jonny will be doing that a lot. This isn’t Patrick’s real life. He can’t even quite believe it’s his real future. What kind of future is this, where Jonny’s just hanging out at his house, swimming in his pool in trunks that don’t hide anything and kissing the back of his neck and now—

Jonny’s hand migrates over to his shoulder, thumb digging into the muscle, and Patrick’s stomach shouldn’t feel this hot. Maybe there was something wrong with the turkey in his sandwich. He’s hyper focused on the amount of space between the two of them, not very much now, but it narrows by tiny bits as Jonny shifts in his seat. Patrick’s still waiting for the shift that’s going to take it too far.

Maybe Patrick will stop him. It would give away that he’s not the Patrick Jonny’s expecting him to be, but so what? Patrick doesn’t _have_ to have sex with Jonny just to keep up appearances. He doesn’t _want_ to have sex with Jonny. He’s fine with what’s happening now, okay, he can live with Jonny’s hand on his shoulder like this, it’s almost buddies, but if Jonny tries anything else, Patrick doesn’t have to go along with it.

Jonny leans over and brushes his mouth against Patrick’s ear, and Patrick’s eyes fall shut and his mouth falls open.

Jonny’s lips are just touching him lightly, mouthing at his earlobe; it’s hardly a touch at all, but it’s tingling all down that side of Patrick’s body. Patrick darts his tongue out to lick his lips. It’s getting hard to breathe, like most of the air has been sucked out of the room, and the air that’s left has been superheated. Like Jonny’s tongue, where it’s tracing his earlobe.

Jonny’s mouth moves to his jaw, little presses of lips and tongue against his skin. “You shaved so smooth,” Jonny says, the words rumbling against Patrick’s jawbone.

Patrick hasn’t shaved for days. He hasn’t had to. There’s no danger of him saying that, though, because he’s currently gasping for the five remaining air particles left in the room.

Any minute now he’s going to stop this. Any second—

Jonny turns his head and takes his mouth, and Patrick sinks back into the couch cushions.

His hands are in Jonny’s hair and he’s sucking hungrily at his tongue before it occurs to him that this isn’t what he planned on doing. But fuck, Jonny’s mouth. It can’t be too bad to keep kissing him like this. Just a little while longer. Just until Patrick gets enough of this, of Jonny’s mobile mouth against his, of the way Jonny’s breath huffs out onto his cheek, of the little sounds Jonny makes while he presses his hands into Patrick’s chest, tracing muscles greedily.

“You feel so,” Jonny whispers, and Patrick’s putting out his hands and pulling him closer without thinking, getting his hands on the taut end-of-season muscles of Jonny’s shoulders, the sun-heated skin of his sides. Everywhere the water was glistening earlier. Jonny’s thumb skids over Patrick’s nipple, and Patrick cries out, cock throbbing in his shorts.

By the time they break apart to breathe, Patrick’s ragingly hard, fighting not to just shove up against Jonny’s thigh and finish himself off. Jonny’s mouth is red and wet and there’s a little scar there in the corner that Patrick had never noticed before but right now he wants to eat it. He’s had sex with three different girls and has never felt this desperate for it.

“How do you want it?” Jonny asks.

Patrick’s mouth works for a second without any sound coming out. “However you—” he manages to say.

Jonny laughs, this low rough sound that’s been dragged over gravel. “You actually letting me be in charge?” he asks, leaning in to nip at the corner of Patrick’s jaw.

Patrick wants to push back against that, but he also feels like if Jonny doesn’t touch him soon he’s gonna die, and he can’t—“Shut up,” he says, punching Jonny weakly in the arm. “Just—”

Jonny laughs again and drags him up off the couch. Then they’re standing and Jonny’s kissing him on the neck, and their cocks are scraping together through their shorts, and Patrick’s whole body flares like an electrical grid shorting out. “Hey, careful,” Jonny says, keeping him up when his knees would have buckled, and then Patrick’s cock is pressed up against Jonny’s and he can’t fucking _breathe. _“I’ll take care of you.”__

__Patrick whimpers. He feels a sick flush of shame a second later, but he can’t help it: his whole body is out of his control. It feels amazing._ _

__Jonny gets them upstairs to Patrick’s bedroom, to the bed with its awesome black satin sheets—“Your fucking taste, man,” Jonny says, laughing as he pushes Patrick back onto them._ _

__“Like you don’t like how I look on them,” Patrick says, and then shock bubbles up when he realizes it must be true. Jonny wants to have sex with him—Jonny’s looking down at him, splayed out like this—he feels his body get hot, the skin of his face and chest and arms burning._ _

__Jonny lets out this little moan. “Love how red you get,” he says, kissing the flush down his neck to his chest. Then he pulls the shirt over Patrick’s head so he can keep kissing down, sucking Patrick’s nipples into his mouth one by one, and by this point Patrick’s lying boneless on the sheets, incapable of doing anything but shivering from arousal._ _

__He didn’t think his body had this setting. Maybe it’s a—time travel thing, or a—he doesn’t fucking know except Jonny hasn’t even touched his cock yet and he’s already losing it._ _

__“You taste like chlorine,” Jonny says, making a face, and Patrick laughs feebly._ _

__“I don’t care, just keep—” he says, getting his hands on Jonny’s head to keep his mouth on his skin. Those wicked flicks of his tongue._ _

__“So bossy,” Jonny says, the king of the pot and the kettle, and Patrick laughs again but it turns into a choke as Jonny gets his fly open. “Fuck, you’re _so_ hard,” Jonny says, like this is news, Patrick’s vision is blurring from how turned on he is, but Jonny doesn’t put his mouth on his cock. He just slaps his hip instead. “Turn over.”_ _

__“Come _on_ ,” Patrick says, hips twitching up. He wants that mouth, he wants that tongue where it counts._ _

__“You said however I want,” Jonny says, and it should be bossy and stubborn and annoying, and it is, but also Jonny’s looking at him and his eyes are really dark and intense and Patrick gets caught on them—_ _

__“Yeah,” he says, soundless, and finds himself turning over._ _

__He’s kind of shocked with himself for doing it. But then Jonny’s fingers slide into the crack of his ass and Patrick can’t think about anything else._ _

__It feels strange, like when he used the toy there. Jonny’s touching nerves Patrick doesn’t usually have, nerves that lead to body parts that aren’t usually there either, a whole new piece of him he never pays attention to normally. Then—something so much hotter than before, wet and hot and mobile, Jonny’s _tongue_ —_ _

__“Oh,” Patrick says, clawing his fingers into the bedsheets. “Oh, _fuck._ ” Jonny’s tongue is working into his hole, and Patrick’s never—he’s falling apart, he’s mouthing at the sheets, he’s shoving back into it—_ _

__Jonny hums against his rim and Patrick’s balls pull tight._ _

__“Jonny,” he chokes out. “I’m gonna—”_ _

__“Already?” Jonny says, astonished, pulling back._ _

__“Yes—no—I just—” Patrick’s not. He just, he can’t take this, it’s so much more than anything else has ever been. “I—”_ _

__“Yeah, yeah, sh,” Jonny says, smoothing a hand down his back, and Patrick wants to object to being gentled like a horse except he relaxes under the touch. “I’m gonna—you’re good.”_ _

__There are some sounds then, Jonny looking for something, the sound of a cap, and then the touch at Patrick’s rim is wet and cold. He yelps a little. “Sorry, sorry,” Jonny says, and the touch gets warmer little by little, and then Jonny’s finger is inside Patrick’s hole._ _

__It’s weird enough that it pulls him back from the edge for a bit. But as Jonny slides his finger out and in, the muscles start to accommodate him, and then it feels—Patrick squirms on it. Wants more. Gets more, when Jonny slides in another finger, and then his fingers brush something that puts Patrick on the edge of coming again, teeth gritted and hands clenched in the sheets._ _

__“You’re so tight,” Jonny says. His voice has gone ragged. “It’s only been, what, four days?”_ _

__It’s been eighteen years. It’s been forever. It’s been a whole lot of wasted time, because Patrick wants to feel like this every second of every day forever. “Jonny,” he moans, not even sure what he’s asking for._ _

__“Yeah,” Jonny says, shaky, and puts in another finger that makes Patrick gasp soundlessly into the sheet. “Yeah, I’m gonna—”_ _

__Patrick doesn’t even think about what that means, doesn’t have any mental space for thinking. But he definitely notices when the fingers disappear, when those tantalizing little glimpses of heaven vanish. He whines and shoves back._ _

__“Hang on,” Jonny says, half-laughing, and then there’s new pressure. Thick pressure at his hole, pushing its way inside, rearranging his insides like nothing has so far._ _

__“Oh holy fuck,” Patrick says as he realizes what that must be, and the realization spreads like a wave of heat down from his throat through the clenched muscles of his stomach to his ass. It makes everything go tight for a bright second and then release—and then Jonny slides in, thick and smooth and oh-fucking-god perfect._ _

__“Patrick, fuck, that’s,” Jonny says, sounding like his entire body is clenched, because _his cock is inside Patrick.__ _

__Then he slides forward a little more and nudges Patrick’s prostate._ _

__This is why people do this, Patrick thinks hazily when the blindness of the pleasure wash has cleared. His cock is full and hard between his legs, throbbing, and his balls are tight and hot. People must be crazy not to do this. Everyone should be getting fucked all the time, but not by Jonny, because Jonny is going to be too busy fucking _him.__ _

__Jonny fucks him in quick strong strokes, his hands on Patrick’s hips and his mouth keeping up a half-nonsense stream about how good this is, how hot Patrick is, how amazing he looks speared on Jonny’s cock. Patrick lies under him and sweats and shoves back with each stroke and feels like his limbs are going to fly off his body with how good this is._ _

__“Seriously, never felt anything like you,” Jonny says, words slurring as his hips speed up. “Want to fuck you forever. Wanted to fuck you on the ice—that _goal_ , Patrick—gorgeous and perfect and—”_ _

__Patrick’s letting out the most embarrassing sounds but he doesn’t care. Doesn’t know what Jonny’s talking about, what goal, it’s July, doesn’t care, as long as Jonny’s cock keeps forcing him open like that, as long as he keeps hitting that spot that makes the whole world dissolve—and then it’s mounting too high, all the pleasure building up to a breaking point, and his cock is jerking untouched and he’s coming, coming, coming._ _

__It feels like he comes with his whole body instead of just his cock. Usually it’s sort of a focused experience—it’s obvious where the pleasure is—but with Jonny’s cock driving him toward it, the feeling’s more spread out, like a net of pleasure the whole of him is caught in, finally exploding into the most overwhelming orgasm he’s had in his entire life. He can’t even think or breathe or notice when Jonny’s coming too, except then Jonny’s cock thrusts deep and stays there, and Patrick thinks he feels—_ _

__Jonny collapses kind of sideways, his cock slipping free of Patrick, and there’s a squelching feeling and a tickle of something running down his leg and _holy fuck Jonathan Toews just came inside of him.__ _

__Patrick lies with his head against Jonny’s side, listening dazedly to the too-loud thumping of Jonny’s heart as he comes down, and thinks that that didn’t go at all the way he planned._ _


	6. September 4, 2011

Patrick doesn’t make it out to the blue box until hours later. It turns out the reason Jonny took a while to get Patrick into bed was that once they got there, they weren’t going to leave. Jonny fucked him again, after they’d napped, and this time he put his mouth back on Patrick’s hole afterward and licked out the come, and Patrick was just not prepared to handle any of this.

His legs are wobbly and his stomach still lit up with random sparks as he makes his way back outside. He left Jonny asleep, with a note that said he’d gone out and would be back later. He feels kind of scuzzy about that, like he’s running out after sex. Which he sort of is. He thinks about staying for a while instead—not to have sex again, obviously, just to keep Jonny from worrying, and if they happened to have sex again, well—

But Patrick can’t just stay in this time forever. He doesn’t belong here. And there’s bound to be a current version of himself arriving at some point—Jonny said he wasn’t sure when Patrick was showing up, which has to mean it’s soon. He might even be deliberately staying away until he knows time-traveling Patrick is gone, and it seems mean to keep the poor guy waiting for too long. Especially when Jonny’s asleep in the bedroom, sprawled naked on the sheets and probably ready for another round soon.

Besides, wherever Patrick’s going next, there’s probably going to be a Jonny to fuck him there, too.

That’s not why he touches the handle, though. He’s trying to get home. Obviously. But he opens the door a little more quickly than he has been recently, and when he’s not in the basement of the UC he’s not entirely disappointed.

He’s outside again, a warm day that feels like maybe late summer. His phone tells him it’s September 4, 2011—over a year later than last time.

It smells really fresh here, like car exhaust hasn’t touched this place in a while. Not the most promising place for fucking—er, for finding people. But every time Patrick’s gone somewhere, Jonny’s shown up pretty quickly. He probably only has to wait.

Patrick keeps his phone in his hand and wanders through the trees a little, making sure not to get too far away from the blue box. There’s water here: a lake or pond or whatever, a deep green color with rushes thick around it. There don’t seem to be, like, paths or anything, but there probably are somewhere nearby.

An hour or so later Patrick’s starting to question it. He’s sitting on a moss-covered rock by the water’s edge, and it was nice for a while, but now the sun is starting to get too hot and he’s wishing he had some food. The sandwich he had with Jonny is starting feel like it was a long time ago. And he’d kill for a bottle of water.

He goes back into the blue box and goes through the door to the bedroom. The bathroom tap runs (how? What is it connected to? Patrick doesn’t understand this box at all), and Patrick scoops water into his mouth until he’s feeling a little less crazed. That just makes him hungrier, though, and when he comes out of the bathroom he’s about to go back into the main room before he notices another door in the far wall.

Okay. Patrick’s not the most observant person in the world—off the ice, anyway—but he _knows_ that door wasn’t there before. He would have opened it. He does now, half-angrily, like he wants to catch it in the act of not being a door after all—and it opens into a kitchen.

That’s enough to get Patrick to forget about the door’s weirdness. He goes for the fridge, which is pretty normal-looking, and pulls out everything he sees that looks good. Which, once it’s all laid out on the counter, he realizes is exactly the ingredients for the sandwich he just had with Jonny.

Patrick blinks at it. It’s not just similar stuff; it’s actually the same stuff. Like, here’s the butter with olive oil in it that Jonny told him was supposed to be marginally better for him (”if you _have_ to use butter, Patrick, at least use—”), and it’s halfway used. Just like the tub in the kitchen of his house.

Patrick backs away slowly. The food on the counter keeps sitting there.

It takes a few minutes for the grumbling of his stomach to win out over the weirdness of the situation. Like, he’s already in a time-traveling box; is it really any weirder if the food seems to be stolen from the times he’s visited? As long as it still tastes good.

Patrick makes himself a sandwich. It tastes _very_ good.

He definitely feels more like a human being when he goes back outside, especially when he remembers that there’s a shower in the bathroom, which gets rid of the chlorine and the reminders of the sex that he’s very much not thinking about.

It’s one in the afternoon by this point, and there’s still no sign of anyone else around. Patrick’s starting to get impatient. He just wanted to know what he’s dealing with, here; is that asking so much?

He pulls out his phone again and checks the map app. And starts laughing.

It takes a couple of minutes for him to stop, which might be a sign of impending hysteria. He’s been in four different calendar years in the past week alone. He’s played a hockey game with players and a coach he’s never seen before, met his younger sister when she was older than him, and let himself be fucked by a teammate. Nothing should surprise him anymore. Not even finding out that he’s sitting on the shore of Lake Toews.

He looks out at the placid green water. Figures Jonny would have a lake named after him. It makes Patrick want to Google him, see what triggered it—did Jonny win for Canada at the Olympics? (Sacrilege; the U.S. will obviously win at the next Olympics.) Or was it something Jonny did with—

Nope. Patrick’s not Googling the Hawks. He already decided. He stills his twitching fingers.

Lake Toews seems to be in the middle of nowhere. It’s just as well; if Jonny were here, Patrick might do something he’d end up regretting, and it’s probably better to put a stop to that.

He wonders if time-travel-induced insanity is a thing. He definitely wasn’t gay before this; at least, he’s pretty sure he wasn’t. Maybe he looked at guys in the locker room a few times, but who didn’t? That was just curiosity. Everyone wants to know how they compare to other players. And maybe a few guys’ faces have sometimes popped into his mind while he was jerking off, but that was usually cool characters from movies or whatever. Like, everyone thought George Clooney in _Ocean’s Eleven_ was kind of hot, right? That was just a universal human experience. Nothing to do with actual sexuality.

He remembers the dig of Jonny’s fingers into his hips while his cock thrust into him, and a shiver travels from his core out to the tips of his fingers and toes.

Okay. Enough of sitting around in the middle of nowhere. This is probably what actually causes the time-travel-induced insanity. Patrick goes back into the blue box and touches the handle.

Nothing happens.

“You’re fucking joking,” Patrick says. It’s been at least…well, it’s been maybe two hours. He supposes that’s not very long. But it feels like he’s been here forever. It feels like it’s been years since he—oh. It actually has been a really long time since he slept.

This time travel thing is hell on the circadian rhythms. Patrick turns his back on the gorgeous sunny afternoon and goes into the bedroom to lie down.

He charges his phone before he goes to sleep—it’s had a lot of strain on it, too, adapting to all these different times—and as he does he remembers the other contents of the nightstand. Not that it—he’s not going to use them. Not again. But he didn’t get a very good look before, and he’s kind of curious about what else was in there, so he opens the bottom drawer.

The little wand he used last time is there on top. It makes his ass clench to look at it, remembering the pleasure of the thing on his prostate, and the heart-stopping jolts of Jonny’s cock doing the same thing. He could use it again—his ass is sore, but not too bad, and the thing is slim—

He remembers how good the stretch was, though, when Jonny’s cock breached him. He puts the wand aside and looks a little deeper.

There’s this one blue silicone thing that’s kind of baffling—it looks like a tree, almost, or a flower, a short central shaft and all these long stylized branches, thick at the base and then tapering to a point like elongated teardrops. Patrick has no idea how that fits in with the other sex toys, but there’s a button at the base, so he pushes it.

The branches start waving gently, like seaweed fronds in the water.

Patrick tilts his head at it. It’s kind of…soothing to watch, but he doesn’t know where he would _put_ it. Maybe it’s not a sex toy at all—this whole box/spaceship/whatever is weird enough that it could be anything, really.

He lowers the thing, not bothering to turn it off first, and one of the waving tendrils darts into his pajama pants and wraps itself around his cock.

Patrick gasps and arches into the sensation. The thing is—it’s— _squeezing,_ like a super long finger, or, or, a hand, or—it’s hard to think when it’s doing that. The thing is winding around the base of his cock and spiraling toward the tip, and then back, not pulling at the skin at all. It’s _slippery_ , actually, like it’s all lubed up, and wow, it works _fast._

Patrick stares dumbly down at the thing working inside his pajama pants. Then he hurries to get them off.

It’s awkward, trying to get his pants off while still holding the thing—he’s not gonna interrupt that sensation—but he ends up on the bed naked before his knees get out, so, win. The tendril around his cock is, like, an extra-long one, because it wraps around a couple of times before it runs out of length. The other tendrils are still waving gently, but now they’re arching towards him, and the one around his cock is sort of—tugging. Trying to get the base of the toy nearer to itself.

Fuck, Patrick’s not gonna argue. He lets the base of the thing rest between his thighs, and the other tendrils start working right away, stroking at the skin of his thighs lightly enough to make them tingle. Then—he blinks in case the ridiculous pleasure in his cock is making him see things—a couple of the other tendrils elongate just a little and start to tease his balls.

Yeah, he’s not seeing things. Another couple of tendrils are getting longer while he watches, way longer than should even be possible, stretching and stretching until they reach up his chest and start fondling his nipples.

Patrick gasps soundlessly and curls into it. Another tendril reaches up past them to his lips, and he opens to it, letting it slip inside and play with his tongue.

Well, okay, he thinks he’s figured out what the thing does.

The taste of the thing in his mouth isn’t like silicone at all: it’s fresh, like water, with just the faintest trace of real fresh fruit. The surface pulsates and has a little give to it, almost like skin. Patrick curls his tongue around it.

And then jumps, because one of the tentacles has worked its way down to tease at his opening.

Patrick moans around the tentacle in his mouth. He’s still sore down there—more so than he thought, now that the tentacle is touching him. Maybe it can tell, because it touches him very gently, slick with more of that stuff it’s using on his cock. It’s hard to feel any pain anyway, the way the thing is milking his cock, and anyway he wants—he wants—

The tip of the tentacle pokes inside and Patrick gasps with relief, while the tip of the one around his cock plays with the sensitive spot right under his cock head. The twinge of the penetration mingles with the burst of pleasure and it all becomes one thing, pleasure-pain that shoots fire along his nerves. His ass gives way to let the tentacle enter, and it pushes very slowly in and in and in until Patrick is panting around this feeling of incredible fullness. It’s almost as good as when Jonny—

And suddenly Patrick can picture Jonny there, sitting next to him on the bed, watching Patrick get fucked open by a slick blue tentacle while the others stroke over his body until he falls apart. Jonny would be hot-eyed, the way he gets when he’s really intent on watching a play, and his cock would be out. His cock would definitely be out. Patrick got a really good look at that cock yesterday—today?—and he can picture how Jonny would look with his hand wrapped around it, pulling fast but not letting his eyes close because he’s so fixated on what’s happening to Patrick. Can’t take his eyes off it.

Patrick sucks desperately on the tentacle in his mouth and flexes around the one in his ass as he imagines Jonny’s eyes on him, Jonny’s hands on him, Jonny’s voice telling him how good he looks. _You like having that in you, right, stuffed from both ends,_ and Patrick _does_ , he does. He’s sweating and shoving into the touch, and then the tentacle in his ass starts growing—swelling so that there’s a bulge there, a bulge that grinds against his prostate with every thrust of the tentacle, _oh_ —

Patrick goes blind as the tentacles all over his body press in harder, rubbing against every sensitive nerve he has as it all reaches a peak and crashes over him. In his mind he sees Jonny coming: sees the look of concentration on Jonny’s face as he gives it up, shoots all over himself at the sight of Patrick. Patrick, impaled on tentacles.

Patrick falls limp to the bed. The tentacles slowly withdraw, giving little parting strokes that make him spasm with aftershocks. His body feels like it was taken apart and put back together by someone with only a rudimentary idea of anatomy. He feels amazing. He feels…kind of sheepish.

So, okay. Maybe he does want to be fucked by Jonny. Somehow, at the moment, it’s hard to feel very upset about that.


	7. February 26, 2012

After that Patrick doesn’t even bother telling himself he doesn’t want to fuck Jonny. Mostly he’s focused on getting Jonny alone so he can fuck him _again._

Like, he wants to go back to his own time, obviously. He doesn’t want to be stuck bouncing around to different times forever. But if, before he gets there, he happens to end up alone with Jonny…well, he wouldn’t hate it.

The box does not make it easy. Here is a list of the next few places it shows up:

At a golf tournament in the summer of 2009, where Sharpy whisks them off to dinner before Patrick can so much as drag Jonny into a broom closet at the clubhouse;

At Patrick’s condo in December of 2011, when the whole team is over for a video game tournament and Seabs insists on giving Jonny a ride home;

At a Halloween party in 2008, when Jonny’s dressed as one of the X-men and Patrick _still_ wants to fuck him blind but can’t even tell if they’re dating or not yet; 

At a street fair in Chicago in the October of 2010, behind a row of Port-a-Pottys that Patrick considers dragging Jonny into before deciding he isn’t quite _that_ desperate;

And in a hotel in Philadelphia in February of 2011 where they’re about to have sex before Sharpy gets sexiled and crashes in their room, and Patrick and Jonny end up sharing a bed and holding hands desperately under the covers all night long.

The thing that sucks the most is that Jonny isn’t as frustrated as he is. Jonny has a Patrick in his timeline; he’s probably banging him on the regular. Patrick _hopes_ he’s banging him on the regular, because if he’s not, what is he even living his life for?

Granted, the timeline-appropriate version of Patrick is never actually there when Patrick himself is. But it always seems like he’s just stepped out for a minute, like he’ll be right back when time-traveling Patrick leaves. Patrick’s pretty much decided it’s some kind of magic act the blue box performs, like how it never seems to show up in the middle of a crowd of people or in Timbuktu or halfway through a wall or anything. He’s not going to question it too hard.

It’s really very impressive, the blue box. Except that it _won’t bring him back home_ and won’t even bring him somewhere he can fuck Jonny, which is the only possible consolation for not bringing him back home. He’s kind of like it if it could do both, actually: let him fuck Jonny a few more times, and then bring him back home. Is that too much to ask?

The next time the box materializes, he’s in a condo he knows—Jonny’s, in the spare room where Jonny keeps his weights. It’s February 26, 2012. Patrick says a quick prayer to the gods of fucking that the entire team won’t be involved in a video game tournament or building a pillow fort or something, and steps out into the hall.

The condo is quiet. So probably not a video game tournament. The door is partway open to Jonny’s room, the lights off inside; Patrick peers inside for a minute before pushing the door open slowly, and someone inside hisses in alarm.

“Sorry,” Patrick whispers, before he even registers what’s going on. He can see that Jonny’s lying in the bed, but he can’t see much more than that. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just, the light from the hall.” Fuck, Jonny sounds _awful_. Patrick’s never heard this tone of voice from him—or maybe from anyone, though he has a flash to his grandmother when she was in the hospital for the last time, and his whole body goes tense. “Can you…”

“Yes. Sorry.” Patrick slips inside and shuts the door most of the way again. He can’t see very well now, but it’s enough to make his way over to the bed. As his eyes adjust, he makes out Jonny lying in in the bed, flat on his back, eyes closed. Patrick can’t see anything specific that’s wrong, but he’s cold with dread.

He kneels down beside the bed and brushes his fingers against Jonny’s sleeve—doesn’t want to do more, without knowing where he’s hurt. “What’s wrong?”

“Just—a bad day,” Jonny says. His words are a little slurred, like pronouncing them all the way would be too much effort. “Thought you had a game.”

Patrick raises his hand and rests his fingertips on the side of Jonny’s face. “Does your head hurt?” he asks, and Jonny makes this little choked sound that might be a laugh.

“Does my—yeah,” he says. “Yeah, my head hurts. Fucking hurts, Pat.”

Patrick’s heart is beating hard, a sick loud thumping in his ears. “What can I do?”

“Sit with me?” Jonny asks—voice faint and unlike anything Patrick’s ever heard from him. “And keep—yeah.”

Patrick’s stroking his fingers lightly over Jonny’s forehead, fingers shaking a little. “Yeah,” he says, trying to keep his voice steady. “Yeah, I just have to…make a phone call first.”

He’s breathing hard when he presses the call button, and by the time his mom answers, he can’t quite get words to come out. “What’s wrong?” she says, instantly on the alert. “Is it Jonny?”

She must know. She must already know. “Mom,” he says. He doesn’t know what’s happening to his body. He can’t seem to get his heart to slow down.

“I know, baby, I know,” she says. “It must be hard on you both.”

Patrick squeezes his eyes shut. “He looks so—”

“I know,” she says again. “But he’s gonna be okay. You told me that, remember?”

“I did?”

“Just last night,” she says. “When he had the doctor’s appointment, you said the concussion was bad, but they thought he’d make a full recovery. Remember?”

Patrick forces himself to breathe past the ache in his throat. He has to keep it together. Remember who he’s supposed to be here. “Yeah. Of course. It’s just…”

“I can’t imagine what it must be like to watch someone you love go through that,” she says quietly, and Patrick chokes on his next words.

“Baby? You there?” she says after a minute.

“Yeah,” Patrick says. He’s standing in Jonny’s dining room, hand clenched around a curtain tassel. “Yeah, I’m just.”

“You call me anytime,” she says. “I never want you to think it’s too much. I’m here for you anytime.”

“Thanks.” He leans his forehead against the wall. “I should probably…”

“Give him our love,” she says.

Patrick stands with his forehead pressed against the wall for another minute. Then he turns back to face Jonny’s bedroom.

Jonny’s lying just like how Patrick left him. Patrick’s careful not to open the door too much this time. “Do you want me to, uh,” Patrick whispers, and Jonny reaches out and grabs his hand. Patrick has to swallow hard.

He climbs onto the bed, positioning himself against the headboard so that Jonny’s head is next to his hip. Jonny tips his head to rest against him, and Patrick slides his hand into his hair and starts stroking his scalp. Jonny makes a little _mm_ sound, and then he says, “No, like—no, here, come on—”

Patrick kind of wants to snap at him when Jonny starts rearranging them—Jonny certainly shouldn’t be _moving._ But then Jonny puts his pillow in the cradle of Patrick’s legs and rests his head between them, and the sigh he lets out is so relieved that Patrick can’t bring himself to say anything at all.

He puts his hands back on Jonny’s head instead and starts massaging the temples again, slowly and carefully. He can’t remember ever touching anyone like this; maybe his sisters, when they were crying from skinning their knees or something when they were kids. Certainly not the girls Patrick slept with in Juniors. None of his teammates, ever. He brushes his fingers across Jonny’s hairline and breathes deeply and carefully against the feeling that’s trying to rise again in his chest.

They pass long quiet minutes like that, and Patrick thinks maybe Jonny’s fallen asleep—his breathing’s gotten really even—but then Jonny makes a little noise and tips his head up. Patrick lets his hands travel down, massages his fingers over Jonny’s jawline, and Jonny turns his head to the side and presses a kiss to Patrick’s palm. Patrick cups his other around the side of Jonny’s face, jaw and stubble and curve of his neck just under his chin. Doesn’t press hard; just holds his hand there, like he can hold all of Jonny that way.

“I’m scared,” Jonny whispers into the darkness and Patrick’s palm, and Patrick feels coldness wash over the back of his shoulders.

“You’ll be okay,” he says.

“We don’t know that,” Jonny whispers, and Patrick can’t argue with him. The present version of himself said Jonny would be all right—but what do the doctors really know? And what if Patrick was lying to reassure his mom? This is the latest point of the future Patrick’s ever seen. He doesn’t know what happens to Jonny after 2012.

Jonny’s such a good hockey player. If he can’t get out on the ice again—if he can’t drive the puck forward with that single-minded purpose that leaves Patrick breathless and giddy every time he plays on his line—the loss of that cuts through Patrick’s gut. It’s too horrible. It can’t be true.

“You will,” Patrick says fiercely. “You’re so…” And he makes himself stop, because this isn’t about him; this is about what Jonny needs to hear, and Patrick can barely stretch himself to think about that right now with the fear weighing down all his limbs, but he tries. “If anyone can do it,” he says, “it would be you. You’re so _much_. You have so much in you. You’re not gonna let this stop you.”

It feels so close to true; his chest aches with it. Jonny breathes out heavily against his palm. Patrick feels so small: so out of place, so unprepared for this world five years in the future with a Jonny who expects him to be so much more than he is. This isn’t the version of Patrick who should be saying these things.

He’s the only version of Patrick who’s there right now, though, and he isn’t going to let Jonny suffer this alone. He lets his free hand card through Jonny’s hair again, and Jonny makes a little broken noise and relaxes another few degrees under Patrick’s hands.

Patrick tips his head back and stays, unclenching over and over to make his muscles let go of the fear, until Jonny falls asleep.


	8. December 25, 2011

Patrick stands inside the blue box, staring at the controls.

He should go somewhere else. He doesn’t belong in this time; sooner or later the right Patrick’s going to come back to be with Jonny, or someone’s going to notice the giant blue police box in Jonny’s weight room, and Patrick needs to go back to his own time.

_Not yet, though,_ he thinks as hard as he can at the handle. He doesn’t know how to use the controls; he’s stared at them enough at this point to know that they don’t make any sense to him. All he can do is think at it. _Please don’t take me back. Not until I know if Jonny’s going to be okay._

He closes his eyes tight, praying for 2013, and touches the handle.

He pulls out his phone as soon as the floor stops shaking. His phone doesn’t have reception; it never does inside the box, but he stares at it anyway as he heads to the exit. As soon as he opens the door, the bars start appearing, and the time updates: 6:05 am, Sunday, December 25. 2011.

“Fuck,” Patrick says, and then looks around to see who he might have just offended. He’s in the dark, in a room that’s instantly familiar: the laundry room in the basement of his parents’ house. On Christmas morning.

Patrick sneaks out of the room on high alert. It’s still early in the morning, and he’s never run into himself yet, but it’s Christmas morning at his parents’ house; his other self has to be here.

The house is still quiet. His sisters have been doing a better job in recent years of not waking up at the crack of dawn on Christmas morning, and apparently they’ve gotten even better by 2011. He manages to get up to his bedroom without running into anyone.

He hesitates outside the door. That’s where 2011 version of himself will be—unless the pattern holds, and he isn’t where he’s supposed to be. To make room for time-traveling Patrick.

Patrick pushes open the door cautiously. He freezes when he sees that there’s someone in the bed—but then he looks again and sees that the head on the pillow is dark, not blond.

He creeps a couple of steps inside to make sure 2011-Patrick isn’t just hidden under the covers or something. But no: it seems to just be Jonny. Sleeping in Patrick’s childhood bedroom on Christmas morning.

He looks good. His face is relaxed in sleep, and he looks healthy, somehow tan even though it’s December. Nothing like the horrible drawn pained look on his face when Patrick last saw him. It’s an unbelievable relief to see him well again—even though Patrick knows this is before his injury, not after. He still wants to drink in the sight of him.

The rest of the house is still quiet. Patrick tiptoes toward the bed.

Jonny wakes up a little when Patrick lifts the covers to slide in next to him. “Thought you had to stay on the sofa,” Jonny mumbles, but his hands are already seeking out Patrick’s waist to pull him sleepily in.

“Don’t care,” Patrick says, and he doesn’t: not past the overwhelming relief that is a healthy Jonny’s hands on his body. He presses close and breathes in: sleep-smell, a little sweaty, nothing sour or fevered. He buries his nose in Jonny’s neck.

Jonny jumps a little. “Fuck, that’s cold,” he whispers, and Patrick laughs under his breath and licks the spot warm. “Thought we didn’t want your parents to find you here,” Jonny says, pushing into the touch.

“We can be quiet,” Patrick says. He’s desperate suddenly for more of Jonny against him, more reassurance that he’s alive and all right.

Maybe some of that comes through in his voice, because Jonny says, “Hey. Are you all right?”

He’s trying to pull back, probably to see Patrick’s face. Patrick keeps it hidden in Jonny’s neck and nods.

“Hey.” Jonny’s hand comes up to bury itself in Patrick’s hair. “You know I don’t mind holding off for a few days at your parents’ house.”

“I know,” Patrick mumbles into his neck, though he actually doesn’t know anything of the sort.

“It’s worth it,” Jonny says, lips moving against his scalp, “to be with your family.”

Fuck. Why did he have to say that? Now Patrick’s going to do something dumb, like, like—

Jonny bends his head to kiss Patrick’s forehead, and then he’s kissing down Patrick’s face, to his mouth, and Patrick can close his eyes and kiss back without worrying about the prickling behind his eyelids. Jonny’s mouth tastes musty but not bad, like he brushed his teeth before he slept, and it’s been a while since Patrick got any sleep. He finds himself halfway drifting off to the slow comfort of Jonny’s lips and tongue.

It turns into the two of them just pressed together, Patrick’s nose mashed into Jonny’s cheek while Jonny’s breath brushes his ear. Patrick feels so safe. It never occurred to him he could feel like this in someone’s arms. Certainly not Jonny’s. He would never have thought of that before the last couple of weeks.

“Hey,” he says out of nowhere. “Be careful, okay?”

“With what?” Jonny asks sleepily.

Patrick—doesn’t actually know. He’s such an idiot. He didn’t even look up how the concussion happened. Now he can’t even warn Jonny properly. “Just. On the ice, and stuff. Be careful.”

He has Jonny’s attention now. “What do you mean?” Jonny asks, sounding less sleepy. “Are you—did something happen?”

No, but something _will_ happen. Patrick bites his lip in frustration at not being able to prevent this. Two-plus months from now, Jonny will be lying in that bed like it hurts too much to move, whispering to Patrick that he’s afraid of losing his hockey career. Patrick could maybe do something about it but he doesn’t know _how._

“I just worry about you,” he says.

Jonny strokes a hand up and down his back. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks. “This doesn’t sound like you.”

“Fuck you, I can worry if I want,” Patrick says, and Jonny snorts.

“Obviously. But I feel like you’re…” Jonny trails off.

Jonny’s never called him on being the wrong version before. Patrick’s not sure he ever would—like, how would that even seem like a possibility?—but he’s over four years in the future now. He’s got to look pretty different by now. He hopes he does, anyway—he’d like to think he at least starts growing stubble.

He keeps his head resting against Jonny’s in case the differences are noticeable. “I had a shitty dream,” he says.

“Oh.” Jonny relaxes against him. “’Cause I stole your bed, right?”

“That’s right. Bed thief.” Patrick presses his toes into Jonny’s calf.

Jonny tilts his head and captures his mouth again. Patrick opens to it and kisses back, slow and lazy and early-morning. He likes this, he thinks hazily; a little spark of warning travels through his stomach, telling him he might not get to keep it if he goes back to his time, but he lets the thought pass him by. He has it right now.

They kiss until Patrick hears the bathroom door close in the hall, and they both tense up. “I should go,” Patrick whispers, pushing himself up.

“Mm,” Jonny says, pulling him down to grab another kiss.

Patrick laughs into the kiss. “You’ll see me in a few minutes downstairs.”

“Yeah, but,” Jonny says, looking up at him so happy, and whole, and unbroken, and this time it’s Patrick who bends down to kiss him again until they’re both a little breathless.

He hesitates when he straightens up; he wants to say something, do something, anything to stop what’s going to happen in a couple of months. He can’t let Jonny just—

“ _Go,_ ” Jonny says, rolling his eyes and grinning, and Patrick does, stomach a tight knot.

He makes it downstairs without being seen—just a glance at the sofa in the living room, where he sees his own curly head sticking out above the blanket. He gets down to the laundry room on a burst of adrenaline.

Inside the blue box, he stares at the handle again. _Please,_ he thinks again.


	9. May 1, 2012

The next time Patrick opens the door to leave the blue box, it’s May 1, 2012.

Patrick stares at the time on his phone for maybe two seconds. Then he unlocks the phone and Googles Jonny so fast he mistypes his name three times. He finally hits the go arrow on “jonathsb toewd,” and it pulls up a Wikipedia overview. _Jonathan Bryan Toews is a Canadian professional ice hockey centre who currently serves as captain of the Chicago Blackhawks of the…_

So he’s still playing. It’s not conclusive, though—it’s only been a couple of months. Patrick adds “concussion” to the search bar, and he gets an article from the Bleacher Report. _Chicago Blackhawks captain Jonathan Toews skated with his team for the first time since being removed from the lineup…_

The article is dated March 10. Patrick breathes out in relief.

He still wants to see Jonny for himself. He’s in Jonny’s weight room again, which looks pretty much like it did in February. It’ll be different this time, though. It’s been two and a half months, and Jonny’s skating again. Patrick doesn’t have to be afraid of what he’s going to see.

He slips out of the weight room and heads toward the kitchen, and there’s Jonny, standing upright and looking whole and healthy and—and kind of shocked to see him, actually.

“What the fuck are you doing here,” Jonny says.

Patrick pauses in the doorway. He’s never gotten it wrong before—it always seems like Jonny expects some version of him, or at least like he’s too out of it to notice that Patrick’s presence is weird. But Jonny definitely doesn’t look okay with seeing him right now.

“We said Wednesday,” Jonny says, crossing his arms over his chest. “But, okay. If you’re ready to apologize now, I’m ready to hear it.”

Oh shit. “Um,” Patrick says.

Jonny straightens up, eyes flashing. “Don’t fucking tell me you came back here without an apology.”

“No, just give me a second,” Patrick says, though he has no idea what good a second’s going to do him. He has no idea what he did. Obviously.

Jonny waits, jaw clenching impatiently the longer Patrick stands there panicking. “Fuck’s sake, Patrick,” he says finally, explosively.

“I’m sorry,” Patrick says. He feels like he’s in danger of hyperventilating. “I want to apologize, I just—”

“Don’t give me that horseshit,” Jonny says. “You don’t just come in here and say that shit and then tell me you don’t know—”

“I’m sorry!” Patrick says again. It’s not the apology he needs to make; he can feel it, and he can feel that Jonny feels it, but he doesn’t know how to do better when he _doesn’t know what he did._ “I—didn’t mean it?”

Jonny looks at him for a long minute, jaw tight, and then he says, “You know, I thought we could get past this, but maybe I’m wrong.”

Patrick’s whole body goes cold. “No,” he says. “Don’t, Jonny, it’s just—today doesn’t count. Don’t do anything based on today. It’s just—it’ll be better, it’s just—”

“If you actually meant what you said,” Jonny says flatly, “why would you want to be with me anyway?”

Patrick stares at him, fish-mouthed.

“Get the fuck out,” Jonny says. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

He’s not glaring at Patrick. He’s glaring at the matte white paint of his kitchen wall. But Patrick feels the glare as clearly as if it were turned on him, and he would open his mouth to defend himself, but he doesn’t know what he’d say.

This is the latest he’s been. He’s never seen beyond May 2012. Maybe that’s because…there’s no relationship to see after that.

“Jonny—” he says, a feeble sound.

“Get _out,_ ” Jonny says, iron and flame in his voice, and Patrick does.


	10. 52.4 Evenglim, 34087

Patrick stumbles on his way into the blue box, tripping and falling with his hands on the control panel. _Please don’t be broken,_ he thinks hysterically. His eyes are blurring stupidly as he goes for the handle. _Take me home,_ he thinks, _I just want to go home;_ and he touches it.

It’s barely been any time at all. It shouldn’t work. But it does: the box starts shaking around him, not just the normal amount, but more than it ever has before. Or maybe it’s that Patrick’s body feels bruised by what just happened.

The box stops moving, and he gets up and heads to the door. He’s not sure if he’s hoping for the future, so he can figure out what happened with Jonny, or if he just wants to be back in 2007 so he can stop dealing with this shit at all. He wonders what else he might have messed up by wandering around without knowing what he’s doing. Maybe Jonny was upset when Patrick disappeared from their bed in the summer of 2010. Maybe he was pissed when Patrick didn’t go home with him from the lake in 2009. Maybe there have been other moments when Jonny looked at him expecting an inside joke and found nothing.

Maybe none of it matters because they end up breaking up in 2012.

Patrick reminds himself that he’s not actually in a relationship with Jonny. All he’s done is glimpse a relationship in the future—a future that might not even be real, for all he knows. But he still can’t bear the idea of losing it. It feels awful to think of never holding Jonny in his arms again the way he did on Christmas morning, exchanging lazy kisses and feeling utterly safe and happy. Or—or maybe he _will_ get to do all that, back in 2007, but he’ll know the whole time that it’s going to end. Because he’s going to ruin it.

Patrick can’t bear to think about this anymore. He pushes open the door to the blue box.

And steps out into a world where the grass is purple and the sky is bronze.

Patrick stares around him with wide eyes. Then he pulls out his phone. It’s still showing the date he left Jonny’s on—May 1, 2012. The bar at the top says _No Service._

Oh no. This…is not good.

“Screeee!” says a voice beside him.

Patrick whirls around to see a crab-thing waving its eyestalks at him. Not a normal crab—a huge one, two feet across and iridescent blue. “Um, hi?” Patrick says.

“Screeee!” says the thing again, and more of the crab-things start popping out of holes in the ground and crowd around Patrick, coming toward him curiously.

“Um, yeah, okay, I’m just gonna go,” Patrick says. He turns back to the blue box, but more crab-things have come between him and the closed door, some of them prodding at his clothes with their pincers and others more interested in the box. “Hey, come on, lay off,” he says, shoving at one, and it gets its pincers around his hand and pinches down hard.

“Ow!” he shouts and pulls his hand away. He’s actually bleeding—not much, but the thing broke the skin. “Jeez, what is your problem?”

The crowd shifts. Half a dozen of the largest crabs come towards Patrick.

“Oh no,” Patrick says resignedly, and backs up a couple of paces.

It’s not much of a fight. He’s never been much of a fighter—but in this case he’s handicapped by not having any weapons, and the crab things are just small enough that they slip easily under his guard. He’s reduced to kicking them away, which doesn’t work that well, since there are half a dozen of them and only two of his legs. He keeps having to dodge their attempts to swarm him, kind of like ducking a check on the ice—and when he looks up, he’s a full thirty yards away from the box, and the rest of the crabs are swarming over it. 

“Hey!” he says, making a lunge back toward the box, only to be blocked by two of the largest crabs. He ends up sliding farther away on the slippery grass. “ _Shit,_ ” he says. The crabs are all over the thing.

At least they aren’t actually inside yet—a bunch of them seem to be pushing at the door with no luck. “Yeah, that’s right!” he calls over, falling back another couple of paces. “Not so good at getting in without me, are you?” 

The crab attackers blink up at him, waving their pincers menacingly. Then they all charge him at once.

“Fuck,” Patrick says, and turns and runs

They don’t chase him more than a few dozen yards. When Patrick turns around to look, he sees his attackers heading back to join the others, who are now moving the blue box across the grass. “Fuck!” he shouts again.

He stands with his hands on his hips and watches them. He can’t really do anything else. But he also can’t just stand here. He is fucking not spending his entire life on this random planet full of crabs. Lake Toews would have been a better choice.

He settles for following the crabs at a cautious distance as they move the box. They end up bringing it to the base of some violet-shaded foothills not too far away and dragging it into a sandy hollow at the base of one of the hills. Doesn’t seem like they can take it any farther than that: there are passages built into the ground and the walls of the hollow, but the box is way too big to fit into them.

Small mercies. There are still crabs guarding the box, and Patrick notices others digging behind it, like they’re trying to hollow out the hill to bring it farther inside.

Patrick watches for another minute. “All I wanted to do was play in a hockey game,” he announces to the sky.

The sky doesn’t answer him. Patrick turns around to explore his options.

He ends up gathering rocks from a boulder-ish area nearby. He’s not sure they’ll actually do him much good; he’s never had much of a throwing arm. But they’re the only weapons around, and those little fuckers are not going to keep his box.

He’s bending down, looking for a good-sized throwing rock, when there’s a whine in the air in front of him. A person pops into existence.

Patrick topples over backwards. Jonny’s standing in front of him, glaring down, his hands on his hips. “What are you doing,” Jonny asks, “with my Tardis?”


	11. 52.5 Evenglim, 34087

Patrick stares up. It’s actually Jonny, outlined against the bronze-colored sky. “What are you doing here?” Patrick says.

“Following you, obviously,” Jonny says, flashing something on his wrist—a leather band with a little square thing on it. Patrick’s never seen it before. “But seriously, what the fuck? What are you doing with the Tardis?”

“I’m not _trying_ to do anything,” Patrick says. “I just—” He’s probably insane, is what he is. “Look, I just went into the box, to see what it was, and it took me to another year, but, like, I think it’s probably broken or something, because it kept taking me other places, and—”

Jonny’s giving him an alarmed look. “Hang on. What year are you from?”

“2007,” Patrick says.

“Shit.” Jonny’s eyes go wide. “So you’re from—oh shit.”

“What? Is that bad?” Patrick says.

“No, it’s just—in the kitchen just now. That was—”

“Yeah.” Patrick winces. “Sorry.”

“No, I should have—” Jonny reaches down to help him up. “I should have noticed. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What was I supposed to say, that I was time traveling?” Patrick says. Jonny’s hand is still on his arm, which is making him feel a little better about things. “I didn’t want to get, like, locked up as a crazy person.”

“Patrick,” Jonny says. “I’m a—” He breaks off and laughs a little, and rubs his thumb back and forth over Patrick’s arm.

“What?” Patrick asks.

“I’m a _Time Lord,_ ” Jonny says.

Patrick makes a face. “Is that a thing?”

Jonny shakes his head, not a denial. “I was so afraid for you to find out,” he says, like he’s talking to himself more than Patrick. “I thought maybe you had. And you—you knew this whole time. You _asshole._ ” But he’s laughing.

“Huh?” Patrick says. He is definitely missing something. Maybe a lot of things.

Jonny looks at him in happy exasperation. “You—in 2012. You didn’t want to come out, and I thought—I mean, you were in general, you were—oh. Oh, of course you were always a step ahead of me in our relationship,” he says, looking around, like he’s just realizing the implications.

“Jonny,” Patrick says, impatient.

“Yeah. I thought—I don’t know,” Jonny says. “You always wanted to do stuff before I’d even thought of it, and this time you didn’t want to, and you called me—”

He bites his lip and breaks off. “What?” Patrick asks.

“You called me inhuman,” Jonny says, raising his eyes to Patrick’s.

“Oh shit,” Patrick says.

“I thought you’d just found out,” Jonny says. His gaze flicks away. “I though it made you not want to—”

“ _Oh._ ” Patrick puts his hands on the sides of Jonny’s face, palms on his neck. “No. I would never.” The skin under Patrick’s hands feels so warm and real and human. “And yeah, I guess I…knew.”

“For like five years. Fucker,” Jonny says, grinning at him with so much fondness and relief.

It feels so good to be touching him again. “So are you really…not?” Patrick asks. “I mean…”

“Half,” Jonny says. “My mom is a Time Lord, from—well, the planet’s not there anymore. But anyway. I did grow up in Canada. I just had…a few more field trips than most kids did.”

“In the Tardis,” Patrick guesses, and Jonny nods. This is kind of blowing Patrick’s mind. “I guess I shouldn’t have called you that, huh?”

Jonny shrugs. “It was an argument. We were both being pretty shitty.” He slides his hands up Patrick’s back. “But, uh. I think it’s gonna be okay.”

The look on his face is so much. Almost as much as the way he’s touching Patrick. Patrick runs his fingers over Jonny’s forehead, remembering doing that when Jonny was laid out with a concussion. “I hope so,” he says. “I only just found you.”

“Shit,” Jonny says, looking at his face. “You’re so _young,_ ” he says, breath warm and close on Patrick’s face.

“Not that young,” Patrick says, and leans in to kiss him.

His stomach leaps a little at the daring of it. It feels new: a first kiss in a way the others weren’t. The first kiss where Patrick doesn’t have to be anyone but his current self. It feels unbelievably good, like he’s been waiting for this the whole time.

Jonny kisses back for a while, and then he pulls away sharply. “Hold on,” he says. “2007. We weren’t even—”

“No,” Patrick says. “But don’t worry. You already fucked me.”

Jonny’s eyes bug out of his head, which Patrick has to admit was pretty much his intention. “ _When?_ ”

“2010,” Patrick says, grinning, and Jonny groans.

“I should never have given you access to the Tardis,” he says. “Where did you leave it, anyway?”

“Oh,” Patrick says. “Yeah, about that.”

***

“I can’t believe you lost the Tardis,” Jonny says for the fourth or fifth time as they pick their way carefully back toward the crab cave.

“I didn’t _lose_ it,” Patrick says, also for the fourth or fifth time. “Hey, if anything, it lost me. I didn’t ask it to bring me to this place.”

“It shouldn’t even have let you in,” Jonny grumbles. “You must have turned off the stealth mode.”

“Well, maybe if your dashboard had actual English on it,” Patrick says, but Jonny’s giving him a weird look.

“I had it in stealth mode,” Jonny says slowly, like he’s just putting something together. “How did you even find it?”

“I don’t know, it’s big and blue?” Patrick says.

“And you just…pushed open the door,” Jonny says.

“Should I not have?” Patrick asks. “I mean, obviously, I shouldn’t have. But, like, you left the thing unlocked, so—”

“It wasn’t unlocked,” Jonny says. “That’s the thing. It only opens like that for…”

“For what?” Patrick says when Jonny doesn’t finish.

“Family,” Jonny says, giving Patrick a swift look that makes Patrick’s cheeks heat.

“Oh,” Patrick says, probably way more pleased than he should be.

“Sh,” Jonny says, pulling him behind some rocks. There’s a crab-thing scuttling by.

They’re getting close to the hills where the Tardis was taken. Patrick can see the smashed-down grass where he had his initial crab scuffle.

“Remember the plan?” Jonny asks.

“Duh,” Patrick says

Jonny nods sharply and kisses Patrick on the mouth—casually, like he’s done it hundreds of times—and hands him his improvised bag full of rocks. Then he splits off to sneak around toward the front of the cave.

Patrick watches him go for a second, looking at the bronze light gleaming off Jonny’s bare shoulder blades, and then turns away.

His job involves more climbing than Jonny’s. He circles carefully around through the purple brush toward the back of the hill that has the cave in it. The crab people don’t seem to spend much time above ground, which is handy—he’s not that worried about being spotted. He’s more worried about the front of the hill caving in if he gets too far out over the dugout. But maybe he should be more worried about the first thing, because he’s not even past the crest of the hill when he hears a _screee_ sound from off to his right.

Shit. He puts his head down and runs.

He’s basically at the lip of the overhang when the first crab people get near enough to be a danger. He pelts stones at the ones who are coming at him from behind—doesn’t hit them very hard, but they fall back a few paces—and turns his attention to the ones below. They’re boiling up the sides of their dugout, pouring up over the lip. He starts throwing stones as fast as he can.

There’s no way he can get them all. He only has so many stones in his improvised shirt-bag, and even a solid hit doesn’t always knock a crab down from the edge entirely. He’s not going to kill any of them like this, that’s for sure, and there are enough of them to bring him down ten times over. But he throws as hard as he can and keeps half an eye on the ground below, until he sees the blur of motion that’s Jonny sprinting toward the unguarded Tardis.

“Ha!” Patrick says, throwing a stone extra-hard at a crab-person who shrieks and backs up with its pincers flailing. A couple of them turn and notice what’s going on below, _screeee_ ing madly, but by now Patrick can hear the vworping sound of the engine starting the Tardis vanishes from sight.

He’s never seen that from the other side. It’s pretty freaky, especially when it leaves him standing alone on a hill with about a hundred crab-people and only five rocks.

Patrick’s not worried about what Jonny will do. He’s more worried about what the Tardis will do. Jonny swears he knows how to drive it, but, like. Patrick’s traveled in that thing. Forgive him if his palms start to sweat a little. 

The crab people advance. Patrick tightens a grip on one of his few remaining rocks—and hears a _vworp_ ing sound behind him.

It’s loud, enough to startle the crab people into backing off a few feet. Patrick turns to see Jonny opening the door a dozen yards away. “Quick, get in!” Jonny shouts, over the noise of the settling engine, and Patrick runs for the opening.


	12. -3772 B.H., and November 7, 2007

Patrick has to fight his way into the Tardis, crab people reaching out to try to get in before him. He ends up taking a running leap for it and landing flush against Jonny. Jonny grabs hold of him and slams the door shut behind him, and the box—the Tardis—starts shaking around them.

Patrick holds onto Jonny while the shaking lasts. When it stops, he’s still in Jonny’s arms, Jonny’s bare chest pressed against him. Jonny has one arm firmly around his waist and the other hand on Patrick’s back. It’s kind of unbelievably great.

“Where did you take us?” Patrick asks.

“The middle of the Glauruk system,” Jonny says. “There won’t be any inhabited planets here for a few thousand years. I figured we could use the peace and quiet.”

Patrick blinks at him. “You’re shitting me.”

“Open the door and find out,” Jonny says, hand going to the knob, and Patrick says, “Don’t—” just as the door swings open into empty space.

Patrick braces for it, but there’s no cold rush, no drag of the vacuum, nothing Patrick was taught to expect by science fiction. “What the…”

“It has an atmospheric bubble,” Jonny says, smug.

Patrick is distracted by the sight of the huge yellow star and emptiness of space beyond the door. It’s…ridiculous. It’s breathtaking. Patrick never thought he’d end up in outer space; he only had room for one major childhood dream, and it wasn’t to be an astronaut. But just for a moment, looking at this view, he wonders if he chose wrong.

Jonny comes up behind him and wraps his arms around his waist. Patrick leans back against him. “You do this a lot?” Patrick asks.

“Not anymore,” Jonny says. “I used travel with my parents a lot. My mom gave me this Tardis when I turned eighteen—she has her own that she and my dad use now—but when I signed with the Hawks I decided not to use it anymore.”

“What, never?” Patrick asks. He gestures at the ridiculously amazing view in front of him. “Why the fuck not?”

“I wanted to live my life in order,” Jonny says, shrugging against him. “The hockey thing is enough of an adventure, and I wanted to do it the normal way. I didn’t want to be tempted to guess at the future or try to change it or whatever.”

“Oh. Yeah,” Patrick says. He knows that temptation.

“Besides, it’s not like it was hard.” Jonny nuzzles the back of Patrick’s neck. “Not once I had you.”

Patrick smiles helplessly at the stars. “Corny.”

“Yeah,” Jonny says, not even sounding ashamed of himself.

“Sorry I called you inhuman,” Patrick says, tipping his head against Jonny’s.

“Hey, it’s not like it’s not true,” Jonny says. “I mean, it was shitty. But it would have been shittier if you’d actually had a problem with it.”

“I don’t get why I never told you I knew,” Patrick says.

“You didn’t tell me because you didn’t tell me,” Jonny says.

“Right, but—”

“No, I mean, that’s the reason,” Jonny says. “It’s a time thing. You didn’t tell me because you knew that in my present, in 2012, I didn’t know. So now when you go back you can’t tell me.”

“That’s dumb,” Patrick says. “Can’t I choose to do whatever?”

“You did choose,” Jonny says. “It’s just that now you already know what you chose. If you chose something else, it would make a paradox—so you won’t choose something else. Time only happens one way. It’s not that you’re not allowed to make paradoxes. It’s that you can’t.”

Patrick turns that over in his mind. It makes his head hurt. “Wait,” he says as the implications sink in. “Does that mean that when I go back, I can’t tell you that we…”

“Nope,” Jonny says.

“But,” Patrick says. “We don’t get together for like a year.”

“Something like that,” Jonny says, nipping his ear.

“Fuck.” Patrick is quiet for a minute, then turns around in Jonny’s arms so that they’re facing each other. “Don’t take me back.”

Jonny frowns. “I have to take you back.”

“No you don’t,” Patrick says. “We can just…stay here. Explore the Gobbledygook quadrant or whatever.”

“You’d miss your whole life,” Jonny says.

“But my life is—ugh, fucker,” Patrick says. He puts his hands on either side of Jonny’s face. “You can’t just make me—feel like this about you, and then tell me to—”

Jonny leans in and noses at his cheek. Patrick tilts his head into it without quiet meaning to. “I have to take you back. Because I _do_ take you back. That’s how it all starts. You have to be there with me, so that I can be here with you now.”

Patrick presses his mouth to the stubble at Jonny’s jaw, to the smoother skin of his neck, and breathes in deep. It hasn’t been very long that he’s had Jonny like this—probably not even that many days, if he could count them accurately—but it feels like a lifetime since he thought of Jonny without this as the context. He can’t imagine going back to almost a year of nothing but teammates.

Jonny’s holding him tight, hands moving over Patrick’s back as Patrick explores his neck with his mouth. “We need the time,” Jonny says. “Can you imagine if you had tried to date me the way I was the fall of our rookie year?”

Patrick huffs against Jonny’s skin. “You probably would have tried to lecture me in bed.”

“Hey, what makes you think I won’t do that now?” Jonny says, and Patrick laughs despite himself. He can’t believe he has to live without this dork for another year.

“I’ll be there,” Jonny says, leaning down so their faces are close together. “We’ll be friends.”

Patrick doesn’t want friends. He wants this: his body electrifying from having Jonny’s mouth only an inch away. Knowing that if he leans in Jonny will let him taste it. “Fuck me first, then,” he says, and Jonny sucks in a sharp breath.

They end up on the insanely soft bed, making out like they’ll never get to do it again. Every time Patrick starts thinking about stopping in favor of something else, maybe do something about the way his cock is swollen hot, Jonny’s mouth will move against his in a new way and Patrick will think, _a year without this_ , and he won’t be able to tear himself away. It takes them forever to get naked. Once they are, Patrick hitches his leg over Jonny’s so that their cocks rub together, making them both groan.

Patrick doesn’t want it to end too soon. He wants to exist with Jonny in this pleasure-bubble forever, wants to let his hands wander over Jonny’s body without stopping, the solid muscles of his back and the dip of his waist and his thick round glutes.

Fuck, Jonny’s ass. Patrick remembers sneaking glances at it in the locker room before he knew that Jonny was anything other than a frustrating person to argue with. He runs a finger down between the cheeks, and Jonny shudders against him. “I could…” Patrick whispers.

“No,” Jonny says quickly.

“Oh. Sorry,” Patrick says. “I was just—”

“No, it’s fine,” Jonny says. “I mean, I like—it’s just. The first time you do that to me is kind of…it’s a lot.” He sounds kind of embarrassed about it. “I kind of want it to be the first time for both of us.”

Patrick’s cock jumps on his stomach. “Then you could—me,” he says, and Jonny nods, lifting his head to take Patrick’s mouth again.

It feels so different than it did the first time, having Jonny open him up. The first time was new and shockingly good and lit up all Patrick’s nerves, but he hadn’t realized how much of a strain it was, pretending to be a different version of himself the whole time. Now it’s just him and Jonny, and it’s really him Jonny’s fingering open, him Jonny’s looking at with wonder and hunger and who’s making Jonny’s cock bob like that against his stomach, an angry red.

Jonny knows him so well. Jonny knows him five years’ worth, this current version of him and so many more, and Jonny—Jonny loves him. Patrick can see it in his face and feel it in his touch and in the way he angles their bodies together, so focused on Patrick, like there’s nothing else in the world.

Patrick has to go back and live without this. But he’ll gain it, one day at a time, the two of them sliding closer together until they’re like this, so close nothing can tear them apart. Until Jonny looks at him like this again.

“Come on. Now,” he says, and Jonny bites his lip and slides into him, cock pushing farther than Patrick would have thought possible and joining them together and so good that Patrick would wait for way more than year, if it meant having this again. So good that he would wait forever.

***

They lie together afterwards, not wanting to get up. “Will you tell me what it was like, when you were a kid?” Patrick asks, while Jonny plays with Patrick’s curls.

“I don’t know,” Jonny says. “I don’t know if I should, I mean. You already know so much more than I thought you did. I don’t know if I want to make it worse.”

“Yeah, okay.” It’s a new pang, a part of Jonny that’s cut off from him even now. “Will you promise to tell me about it someday?”

Jonny grins. “Yeah, I’ll go back and tell you about it right now.”

Patrick burrows his face into the pillow a little. “I’m so jealous of that guy.”

“Don’t be. My stories aren’t that good,” Jonny says, even though that’s not what Patrick means and they both know it. “I’m gonna tell you so much stuff over the next few years,” he says, coming closer so that his lips brush Patrick’s ear. “You’re gonna see so much. I’d never done anything with a guy before, and it’s gonna be—you’re gonna want to go back for it.”

Patrick lifts his face for kisses. He believes it, but it’s hard to feel it right now. Not when he already has this.

They kiss, and Patrick manages to forget for a few minutes that this is something he’s about to lose. Then Jonny pulls back and says, “We should probably get you back now.”

Patrick nods. It’s true: it’s not going to get any easier the longer they put it off.

They have to drop Jonny off first. Otherwise the Tardis won’t end up where it’s supposed to be. Jonny programs the Tardis to take Patrick back home before he gets out. Patrick watches, and Jonny shows him some stuff: stealth mode, and the locality lock, the things Patrick accidentally turned off before flying to the crab planet. “You shouldn’t fly it without me, though,” Jonny says.

“I know,” Patrick says mournfully. He’s learned that lesson.

Jonny types something on the keyboard that doesn’t have any actual letters on it. Then he touches the control handle, and they’re headed to 2012 Chicago.

The journey takes no time at all. Patrick knows that about traveling via Tardis—it was never more than thirty seconds of the box shaking and groaning around him—but it still feels way shorter than it should when it’s the only thing standing between him and the moment when Jonny walks out of here.

Jonny kisses him at the door, a long, deep kiss that leaves Patrick breathless. “See you soon,” Jonny whispers into the curve of his neck when Patrick finally has to stop for air.

“You’ll see me sooner than I’ll see you,” Patrick complains, even while Jonny’s lips are sending shivers down his back.

“Sooner than you think,” Jonny says, grinning. “I had the Tardis take me to your spare bedroom.”

“Argh,” Patrick says, and Jonny kisses him again, fast this time.

“I love you,” he whispers against Patrick’s mouth, and then he’s out the door while the words are still reverberating their way through Patrick’s body.

The door closes behind him. Patrick looks at it for a long few minutes, and then he turns and heads to the console to go home.

***

When Patrick next steps out of the Tardis, he’s in a storage room in the basement of the UC, and it’s November 7, 2007. At 6:00 am.

Patrick laughs until he starts worrying the laughter might turn into something else. Then he goes back into the Tardis to get some sleep.

A meal, a long nap, and a shower later, and Patrick’s back in the dressing room, pulling on his pads for the game against Columbus. It’s so weird being in the time he’s supposed to be in: he keeps catching himself looking around for people and things that are out of place, but everything’s just the way it should be. He’s the one who knows more than he should, now.

He gave himself plenty of time to find his way up from the basement, so he has most of his gear on by the time the rest of the team starts trickling in. Jonny shows up while he’s taping his stick, and Patrick has to stop and look at him.

He looks so young. He’s older than Patrick is, but Patrick’s used to such a different version. This Jonny’s face is still soft around the edges, those little traces of baby fat, and his body is thinner than Patrick remembers. But so much of him is the same: the shape of his jaw, the curve of his neck that Patrick sucked on while he came just ten or so hours ago.

Jonny notices him staring and looks defensive. “What?”

Patrick bites down on a grin. “I was just thinking about what you said earlier about zone entries.”

Jonny bristles. “I was right,” he says. “You can’t always just hold onto the puck, you’re gonna lose it if you don’t pass—”

“Yeah, I know,” Patrick says. “But sometimes you can. If you’re not in the right spot to pass, if their D is too good, if you’re good enough at controlling the puck.”

Jonny gives him a narrow-eyed look, probably because Patrick sounds so weirdly happy right now. Then he opens his mouth to respond, but Patrick cuts him off with a stick-tap to the ass.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ll show you in the game tonight.” Then he heads out toward the ice, leaving Jonny staring after him in confusion.

Patrick finds himself smiling again as he goes. It’s okay that Jonny doesn’t get it yet. Patrick knows he will—and when he does, the two of them are gonna be unstoppable.

***

_May 1, 2012_

Patrick knows Jonny’s going to show up, obviously. He remembers five years ago well enough for that. But he doesn’t know exactly when, and so he’s taking a nap when Jonny comes bounding into his bedroom.

“What are you—oh,” Patrick says groggily, as Jonny stands in the doorway with a big smile on his face. “Is that a _hickey_?”

“Yeah, eighteen-year-old you isn’t too good at the self-control,” Jonny says, and then he pounces on Patrick and rolls him over in the bed, sending his iPad flying Patrick doesn’t even know where.

“What the fuck,” Patrick says, but it’s not really a question. He remembers what led up to this—can’t believe he forgot it even long enough to make the comment that started this whole mess a few days back. But he guesses he had to, to avoid a paradox. Besides, in his defense, it had been a really long time since he had to remember to clear out and make room for his younger self.

“About time you caught up,” he says as Jonny rolls to a stop with Patrick under him.

“You fucker,” Jonny says happily. “I can’t believe you knew this whole fucking time.”

“Yeah, well, someone told me not to tell,” Patrick says, letting Jonny pin him and lick up the tendon of his neck. He thinks maybe they’re supposed to still be mad at each other, but…well, fuck it. “I think I deserve an award for holding out so long. Like, I think someone promised me stories of his childhood….”

“Oh, I’ll give you a reward,” Jonny says, rocking down against him, and Patrick laughs and goes with it. He’ll negotiate the childhood stories later.

Around when he negotiates more trips in the Tardis. He’s not letting that one go so easy. There’s a whole wide universe out there, and Patrick thinks it’s time the two of them saw it together.


End file.
